I'll tell you something, we take attendance everyday, we track the grades every day and the participation every day, and it was rough in the beginning. It's hurt the kids on-forget the football-it's hurt on a very human visceral level. We just can't do that now.ĮSQ: I can't imagine-because such a big part of the documentary is just this incredible support system that you built, right? The living, the nutrition, and I just can't imagine how much COVID has thrown that out of flux.īP: It really hurt us. These kids, they're like our children and we're intimately involved in their lives. So we can't do that now because of the COVID rule. It's been really hard socially-and when I say social, I mean their living circumstances. Now we've got the technology, they're all hooked up, but you know, sometimes things don't work. And so it's been really hard for our kids. Virtual learning is a wonderful concept, however, if you don't have Wi-Fi in your home or you don't have technology, it's a harder idea. So the problem with it is whenever something comes along that is unexpected, or a natural disaster, anything like that, it's hard for everybody. The kids are looking forward to that.ĮSQ: The documentary focuses so much on how actually being on the football field and holding practices helps them-has that been a struggle to not have that for them this year?īP: It really has been.
We hope, god willing, we're gonna play a spring schedule with about five or six games. And the only way they'll let you play football is if you're a private school. But the city will not let any football be played in the city. And they're playing it, they’re expecting kids. They're playing football in the state of Maryland. But the city of Baltimore is just a wreck. Frances was spending Friday nights at home, no one to play, when Poggi feels like it needed football the most.ĮSQ: I couldn't find too much info out there about what you're doing this season-are you even able to have workouts?īiff Poggi: We had done some 7-on-7 stuff but not as Saint Frances, so we've let kids join pick-up teams that are around 7-on-7. Frances’s national rivals are still running around on ESPN-I didn’t think I’d hear that St. But, with high school football charging on-St. When I called Poggi, I expected to hear about 2020’s effect on his program: Masks at practice, players and their families suffering from the virus and its fallout, how the wake of George Floyd’s death woke so much of the nation up to what these young men have faced since birth.
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Though, the series ends with some hope-most of the seniors earn college scholarships, headed to somewhere, anywhere, but Baltimore. It's not nearly enough to fully capture Poggi's players: Boys becoming men, perpetually at risk for malnourishment, long past accepting gun violence as a daily threat, many of them orphaned. In The Cost of Winning, we only glimpse what's clearly an always-churning saga in Baltimore-the documentary only runs about two hours in total. Cut to Poggi making his own schedule, shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars each season to travel the country to play the nation's best programs, even paying some of them to come to Baltimore. The MIAA said that facing off against St.
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Frances's supporters said the virtual banishment was thinly-veiled racism-the academy is a historically Black school in a conference largely full of white kids in Baltimore's suburbs. Its competitors in Baltimore's MIAA conference started dropping St.
Frances started sending its players to Alabama. Then, those games started showing up on ESPN. Leading a squad that doesn't flinch when it hears gunshots outside of practice, many of its players having lost more family and friends due to gun violence than you can count on your hand, St. Frances had little resources (the team plays its games in a city park, still), until Biff Poggi, former University of Michigan coach, takes over as the school's head coach, after years of fronting his own money (Poggi made a fortune as an investment fund manager) to support the program. Frances Academy's high school football team -a Baltimore-based program that consistently ranks top 10 in the nation -during its 2019 season. HBO's The Cost of Winning just wrapped up the last of its two parts. The adversity tends to happen, you know, in the documentary you just watched, so you're expecting to hear about all the great things they've been up to, a feel-good epilogue for the fans at home. When you call up sports-documentary heroes a year or so later-whether it's Last Chance U's bound-for-D1 guys, or the beef-and-make-good legends in The Last Dance-you expect the conversation to be generally positive.
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