The third season of Netflix’s Last Chance U premieres on Friday, July 20th. While the first two seasons were centered around the lives of JUCO football players at East Mississippi Community College, season three shifts to Independence Community College in Kansas.
With a completely different cast of characters, season three is headlined by a sagacious and outspoken Coach Jason Brown, who is straight outta’ Compton.
BSO sat down with the director Greg Whiteley and Coach Brown, ahead of the Season 3 premiere.
Mark Gilbert: Coach Brown, what were your biggest personal challenges faced, dealing with so many cameras around?
Jason Brown: I didn’t have a lot of personal challenges. We accepted the cameras, and decided that we’re not going to be hypocrites and turn it down. We accepted it with open arms, and once we did that there was no turning back. Once we had that, we had an agreement with Greg [Whiteley] that he could do what he wanted to do, and I trusted him to be as professional as possible like he is, and he runs a very tight ship. So it was kind of a great marriage in that regard.
MG: Greg, what ultimately led you to choose Independence Community College for the third season?
Greg Whiteley: There were a number of teams that we were tracking when the decision was made that we were moving on from East Mississippi to a new school, and there was a handful of schools that were candidates. We arrived at our short list of schools based on: How good are they? Do they have interesting back stories? Is the region of the country a place that could be interesting? Do they have a tradition of winning? Do they have a fan-base?
When we were going through our list of criteria, there were traditional junior college powerhouses that we were familiar with, so we started there, but in digging a little deeper, we learned about this school that had an unbelievable recruiting class, considering how bad they were. This school hadn’t had a winning record for 20 years, and they had landed a number of high profile, notable recruits. Once we reached out to them, and we had a conference call with the president, the athletic director, Coach Brown, and some academic advisors. After two sentences with Jason, I thought, well this is our guy. For us the most important criteria are the rapport that you have with the head coach, and how open he is to being filmed. The next part is how comfortable is that individual on camera. If he is somewhat suspicious or reticent of himself on camera, that has a way of permeating and bleeding through to the rest of the staff and even to some of the players. But his openness and support of the show, was echoed by the rest of the staff. Regardless of how good the team is, we just thought that he’s interesting. His background too, from growing up in Compton California, and landing in rural Kansas makes it very interesting.
MG: Coach can you describe how difficult it is to get players to buy in, and swallow their egos when many came from such prominent football programs?
JB: You got to have a relationship with the players. Players are not stupid, and they see through the BS and used car salesmen. They may not pass classes, but they aren’t stupid in that regard, and especially the ones coming from single-parent homes and not having a lot of males in their life. Respect earned and respect given; We give them the shirt off of our backs basically but they better meet us halfway too, or they won’t be playing too long. It’s a fine line, but certain guys got to have the “It” factor. My coaching staff has the “It” factor, and the kids gravitate to that. My thing with the staff is for every “MF”, you better buy them a burger or tap them on the ass and tell them good job. It’s just one of those things that some guys have it and some guys don’t.
MG: How do you instill the importance of education in players who probably won’t receive major D1 offers after leaving a JUCO?
JB: I tell them work at McDonald’s or go get a damn degree. The bottom line is are you going to work at McDonald’s and put your future in someone else’s hands, or are you going to get a piece of paper and let football pay for your education? I have coaches walk in class to make sure they are in the front row, acting right, not doing anything stupid, wearing hats or texting, and they are building a relationship with their instructor on a day to day basis, so when it comes down to grading time, the teachers will have a rapport with those kids and understand their background a little bit.
MG: Greg, there is clearly a dichotomy that exists between success on the field and in the classroom. Do you foresee the new academic advisor LaTonya Pinkard to jump off the screens the way Brittany Wagner did the first two seasons?
GW: I love Ms. Pinkard, and I loved Brittany. Ms. Pinkard is someone who is in my experience is rare in academic circles. I think there’s a way that you can educate kids, particularly if you’re educating athletes, in which you’re really only concerned about their eligibility, and that makes a lot of sense and doesn’t mean that it is wrong. Those kids are there primarily to play football, so just trying to keep them eligible is a worthy goal and it’s magnanimous to do that.
Ms. Pinkard goes to the next step. She feels very passionately, particularly about these young black men who she tutors, that she wants to challenge them intellectually, and wake them up intellectually. In many cases, she is getting kids that have been passed along, largely because of their athletic talent they have been “hey let’s just keep this kid eligible” whether its middle school or high school, and have not been challenged academically. Ms. Pinkard, in her very gifted way, assumes a role in these kid’s lives that is bigger than football, and it was a privilege to film it. I admire it, and I hope that audiences are as taken with her as I was.
MG: In the trailer, we see former FSU QB Malik Henry tell the camera he doesn’t want to be here in a JUCO program. Does that seem to be a common sentiment expressed amongst players in your program?
JB: I cut dudes left and right, they don’t leave. Cats will not leave our program, regardless of whether I cut them or not because we’ve always been able to get guys to buy in. Players stick around. We’ve had kids that we cut for not making the roster, and I tried to send him to buddies of ours in California or different places, and they refused. They’ll decide to redshirt and play on the practice team, and get the degree. Some of the guys that stuck it out like that, actually got scholarships and didn’t even play a down for us. We had eight alone last year that did. So they like what we are doing in rural Kansas for whatever reason, and I can’t tell you exactly why but maybe the cameras will once it comes out and shed some light.
Tough love and hate me now, love me when you get a scholarship.
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