Anyone’s Game Shows Canadians What They’re Missing at High School Basketball Games

Anyone’s Game Shows Canadians What They’re Missing at High School Basketball Games

The CBC’s new basketball docuseries Anyone’s Game gives Canadians a peek behind the curtain at Orangeville Prep and the life of Matthew-Alexander Moncrieffe

There’s a sort of buzz that radiates from most American high school gyms on weeknights in the winter. It always fascinated me when I was living in the United States that people with hardly any connection to the local high school would show up on a Thursday night in January to watch boys they barely knew play basketball.

In my four years of high school in Toronto, I never went to a single high school basketball game. I don’t know if that says more about me or the culture of high school basketball in Toronto, but I didn’t care, and I don’t think anyone else really did either. Going to games was for parents and siblings I thought, not for the general public. Yet when I moved to the States, I met hundreds of people who went to games just for fun. To them, it was an opportunity to see what the local talent had to offer.

Looking back on it, it’s so strange to me that Toronto and southern Ontario don’t have a bigger high school basketball culture. Maybe we just take the Toronto Raptors for granted. But there’s something special about going to a high school basketball game and seeing Luguentz Dort jump over someone so that four years later when he’s shutting down James Harden in the playoffs you can tell your friend that you saw him play before anyone else knew he was special.

That’s the thing that’s so strange about high school basketball culture in Toronto and southern Ontario. It isn’t like it’s hard to go see NBA and NCAA-level talent. If you head northwest about an hour outside Toronto there’s a basketball program in Mono, Ont. that regularly produces elite basketball players. It’s there at Athlete Institute that Tony McIntyre has built a basketball factory that for some reason still remains a secret.

The CBC and documentary filmmaker Michael Hamilton are hoping to change that with their new six-part series called Anyone’s Game about last season’s Orangeville Prep team that will premiere on CBC on January 15 at 8:30 p.m. ET. It takes you behind the scenes to show viewers what goes on at this elite basketball program seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

It wasn’t long into the filming of the documentary that Hamilton said he realized that he was seeing something special. He remembered seeing former Orangeville Prep standout Matthew-Alexander Moncrieffe — one of the stars of the documentary who now plays for Oklahoma State — take off from the free-throw line and hammer down a ferocious one-handed slam dunk.

“Every day I’d watch M-A [Moncrieffe] play or Orangeville or any of these guys in the Grind Session and they’d do some crazy athletic stuff and you’re just like in disbelief,” Hamilton said.

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