by Jeffrey Stanley
On November 23
rd at 6:30 pm, BFS Athletic Director
David Gardella will display his passion for sports in an unexpected way when his documentary,
Blue Pride!, gets its world premiere screening in the Pearl Street Meeting House. The two-hour movie revisits the 2003 boys' varsity basketball team, led by BFS coach and history teacher
Vlad Malukoff, and their win at the state championship (
see previous in-depth article here), a feat described by some at the time as miraculous but which David and Vlad consider a classic example of what teamwork and personal chemistry can accomplish.
David was so confident in players Kyle Neptune, Edson Elcock, Chad Levy, Jordan Foster, Ian Thomas, Alap Vora, Kenneth Muigai, Ryan Fischer-Werner, and Richard Hempel and Coaches Malukoff, Maurice Washington and Mike Petelka that he took a video camera along on the team's ride upstate to document the big week in Glen Falls. He came home with not only a championship trophy from BFS but 5 hours of footage. Since that time he has kept in touch with the team members and filmed interviews with them and with their former coaches. He also used some of what he'd filmed of the players earlier in the 2002-03 season. This brought the sum total of raw footage to 11 hours.
Boiling it all down to two hours has been a labor of love for David and BFS media teacher Andy Cohen, who was instrumental in the project's completion. The two spent hours together over several years cutting and recutting the movie. "I really could not have done it without Andy and his dedication. This is definitely something special and he understands this," David said.
The two had a specific audience in mind: the players, their families and their coaches. David also made it for the current BFS athletes, "to show what's possible." It's no accident that the screening date is also the day of this season's home opener.
"Basically I had a feeling that we were onto something special, a once in a lifetime feeling," said David of his decision in 2003 to bring along a video camera to the championship and use it frequently, "but the players and the coaches made it truly happen." The camera was often passed around among the team members who conduct tongue-in-cheek interviews with each other. This handheld footage has a raw, cinéma vérité style that conveys the guys' energy, excitement, and good-naturedness. What at the time must surely have seemed to them like mere horsing around during long van rides, a hotel stay, practice at local gyms in Glen Falls and the big game in a 10,000-seat arena, has become a poetic portrait of a charismatic group of young BFS men with great camaraderie and respect for each other off the court.
“I tell you, I’m not one for these mystical explanations, but there was this feeling I had that whatever we did wrong, we’d get out of it somehow, that these guys had a spirit to win the game no matter what," their head coach Vlad said in a 2008 recollection. Despite a bumpy season they made it to the playoffs, then the league tournament, and then the state championship and that final game against Buffalo City Honors. "Buffalo City Honors ties the game up with a 3-point shot at just two seconds to go," recalled Vlad. "If you’re a betting man, you say we’re going to lose. But our guys stepped up. A Buffalo player lobs a little hook shot. Richard Hempel, 6’ 3,” not only blocks the shot, he grabs it out of the air and throws it off to Edson, who gets in front of their best player and makes a winning shot. We win by 1.”
Why did David and Andy take on this gargantuan filmmaking task on top of their intensely busy coaching and teaching schedules? "It's a great story with a great group of people," David said, "and it's extremely important to the BFS athletic history. This story is more than the win. It's the school, the pride, the group and where they are now."