Film explores death of a Minneapolis college basketball team

One of the mysteries of the Twin Cities sports community was the decision by Minneapolis Community and Technical College to kill off its highly successful basketball team after the 2010 season. The reason given was that a Student Senate committee recommended that the program be discontinued and the school's president acted favorably on the recommendation.

Being cut was a program that was runner-up in the 2009 national tournament, and brought in students who might not otherwise have sought a college education. The coach, Jay Pivec, is a member of the National Junior College Athletic Association Hall of Fame.

Local filmmaker Joe Carlini, a two-time Upper Midwest Student Emmy winner and former MCTC student, will premiere his documentary Second Chance U at 4:30 p.m. Sunday at St. Anthony Main Theater.

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"The film starts out like most basketball documentaries or narrative features and hits the cliche of underprivileged kids and the coach that changes their life, and they go all the way to the big game and win! And after the movie everyone's happy," the 24-year-old Carlini wrote in an email. "How about a more realistic approach on a team that has many of those conventions of a sports movie? Well, how about the underprivileged kids, come together to go to the National Championship game and lose by one point -- and then become terminated as a program as a whole. You just don't hear of stories like that."

That's basically the MCTC story -- second nationally after the 2009 season, out of business after the 2010 season.

Pivec took in players like Eric Thomson, a Roosevelt High graduate who played for the school in the early 1990s and went on to play at Oral Roberts and Black Hills State. Carlini shared an email, in which Thomson said: "[Pivec] gave me a chance and it led to a Division I scholarship. I wasn't the first player that he helped and I certainly wasn't the last. But I know we all appreciate the opportunity, even those that didn't make it."

Pivec is still on the MCTC faculty, where he teaches first aid and first responder courses, but he's now coaching at Dakota County Technical College in Rosemount, which started a basketball program last season.

Admission is $8 at the door.