The Cost of Winning (2020)

The HBO documentary series The Cost of Winning follows the football program at St. Frances Academy in Baltimore—the oldest operating Black Catholic educational institution in the United States—and its players’ struggles to obtain university athletic scholarships. The series makers accompanied the team during the 2019 season, as they traveled across the country to compete with other nationally ranked high school programs and on prominent media outlets such as ESPN. The 2019 season was unique for St. Frances because it was their first season competing as an independent football program. The other schools in the Maryland Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MIAA) decided not to compete against St. Frances that season, citing concerns about player safety and the program's competitive advantage resulting from its recruitment practices. Minutes into the first episode, coaches and local observers contend that racism and racial bias is part of the MIAA's decision not to compete against the St. Frances squad. Set against the backdrop of inner-city Baltimore, the series showcases the experiences of the young Black men on the team, highlighting their personal struggles, encounters with racism on and off the field, and aspirations to play college football. Viewers learn about a Black program trying to compete against the best teams in the country and about the struggles of earnest and determined Black players trying to attract the interest of university programs. It is a safe bet that most viewers of The Cost of Winning found or will find themselves rooting for the young men at St. Frances. While much of the series is framed by interviews with the team's coaches, the most intriguing and heart-wrenching parts are when viewers hear from the players themselves: their thoughts about playing on the team, their opinions on things such as their reasons for playing football, encountering racism during games, their experiences growing up and living in Baltimore, and their dreams of playing for a top-ranked intercollegiate program and earning a college education. The young men talk openly about their personal experiences with violence, shootings, and murdered loved ones. The series uses these stories to present the team's collective football experience as a battle to obtain a college education through sport and “get out” of an urban environment rife with poverty, violence, and lack of opportunities. Football is portrayed as a positive force in their lives and one of the few opportunities for them to escape Baltimore and acquire socioeconomic success. The Cost of Winning does a disservice to these young men by incorporating their stories in what is otherwise a regressive narrative about race relations and the state of sports in the United States. First, the series offers precious little critical discussion of the team's racial dynamics, specifically the fact that the program is headed by a wealthy investment fund manager turned high school football coach. Much of the narrative in the series is driven by interviews with Biff Poggi, who previously was the head coach of the football program at the Gilman School, the prestigious and expensive all-boys preparatory academy north of Baltimore. The film spends precious little time on Poggi's personal history, net worth—a quick Google search suggests that it is somewhere between 5 million and 10 million—or the racial dynamics of a wealthy white coach leading a Black high school team. Instead, the series allows Poggi himself to explain, in absurdly vague terms, how he came to lead the program: He doesn't remember how, but for some reason St. Frances asked him to join the school board, and he “saw a lot of opportunities” in the school and its football program. The series offers little critique or contextualization of the fact that Poggi took over a program that was previously underfunded and headed by a Black head coach. Instead, viewers are treated to a story about a wealthy white man who decided, out of his own love for football and desire to bestow charity on the less fortunate, to save the program and use his wealth to impact the lives of young Black men through football. There is no discussion of the structural racial disparities and inequalities that plague communities of color in post-industrial locales like Baltimore, nor do the series makers question Poggi's glorification of sports like football as avenues out of poverty. Much like the lauded high school basketball documentary The Heart of the Game (2005), The Cost of Winning relies on a “White gaze in which sports are portrayed as a corrective to poor Black children. ”1 Relying heavily on interviews with Poggi and the other coaches, the series tells viewers that the young players at St. Frances are given an opportunity to change their lives for the better through football and that their success depends solely on their acceptance of this worldview, the choices they make, and whether they work hard enough to obtain success for themselves. The tragedy of the series is that it presents an oversimplified and decontextualized look at the experiences of athletes of color in today's world of hyper-commercialized high school and college athletics and neoliberal capitalism. Instead of helping viewers better understand the struggles of young Black players as they navigate the exploitative recruitment channels linking high school and college sports, The Cost of Winning glorifies those channels and the coaches and programs that are benefitting from the athletic labor of young (and largely Black) men. Instead of contextualizing the post-industrial decline of cities like Baltimore and linking the plight of urban communities of color with the slashing of municipal budgets and social services, the series idealizes football, an androcentric sport rife with social and health-related issues, as a pathway to socioeconomic mobility. Viewers are told that the players’ chances of success depends entirely on the choices they make in the classroom and on the field, with little focus on the systemic inequalities limiting their opportunities. The series, in short, perpetuates rather than critique the mythos of sport in capitalist America. The young players of St. Frances deserved a better series.