Last Chance U’s director explains restarting from the bottom in Season 3

Netflix’s Last Chance U returns for Season 3 on July 20, and the Emmy-nominated show chronicling the lives of JUCO football players will begin a new era. Instead of East Mississippi Community College, where the first two seasons were set, this year’s school is Independence Community College in Kansas.

SB Nation spoke with one of the series directors, Greg Whiteley, ahead of the Season 3 premiere.

Morgan Moriarty: Was there any worry with respect to familiarity and storyline in going with a different school? Tell me a little bit about the search process and deciding on Independence.

Greg Whiteley: We worried every single year that, well, is this going to be interesting? The first year, we had never done a documentary series before, and we had never done anything sports-related before, and we go, well, do we even know what we’re doing? And then when the first year became a hit, it was, wow, can we do it again?

I think there was the same anxieties heading into Season 3, but zero of them had to do with moving to a new school. All of us had felt that we had kind of told the story that we wanted to tell in Scooba, and we were ready to go to another school and see what stories that they had. We were convinced that there would be good stories to tell. Part of our process in trying to find a new place answered a lot of those anxieties and concerns.

I just know we were chomping at the bit to get to Independence’s campus, based on what we had learned. Part of it was, we looked up their coach online, and he had a really interesting history of bouncing around a couple junior colleges and a few high schools in Southern California. And our phone conversation with him was an all-timer. He’s a 100 percent hustler in the very best sense of the word. We all just adored him.

MM: How different was it going from a powerhouse like EMCC to an up-and-coming program?

GW: There was something that was interesting to us about that, because when you hear these stories, the obvious question when we landed in Scooba was, ‘Well, how did you guys get so good?’ And hearing the stories of the early days of Buddy Stephens and the crappy field and the crappy locker room and — prior to the building of their new stadium — just what it was like, what they had to do to get recruits.

And a lot of us would just sit around and talk: ‘Well gosh, wouldn’t it have been great to be here five, six, seven years ago when this was all happening?’ And we felt like with Independence, Kansas, we were getting that opportunity.

MM: What would you say to fans of the show who are hesitant to watch Season 3 because they’re so used to EMCC?

GW: I’m assuming that the reason why you enjoyed this show is because there is this level of drama, there’s something compelling about these kids as they struggle to keep a dream alive. And that’s certainly true here. In the same reason why you should tune in from Season 1 to Season 2 even though you’ve got new players and even new coaches to follow, the stories are different, but they’re just as compelling.

And in the case of Independence, I think even more so, in some instances. The stakes can be felt really high, particularly in Coach Brown’s life. Here, there’s not only players that are facing their last chance; in many respects, Coach Brown was facing a last chance, and I think the level of drama in Season 3 is just as much if not more so than anything we chronicled in Seasons 1 and 2.

MM: What was it like filming the Independence residents watching their team finally start having a chance to win?

GW: Well, the football team had been so bad for so long that the school, the college, was largely irrelevant.

The town itself has had a surprising amount of success at various sports at the high school level. I had this explained to me by the president of the school, President Dan Barwick. Kansans are competitive, and you could feel because of the history of the town, there was a lot of civic pride. And they looked at the college’s football team as a source of embarrassment.

And when I say Coach Brown, this is particularly his last chance, I don’t mean to say that he wouldn’t coach somewhere else. But he was being given a small window of opportunity to see if he could change some minds that were highly skeptical. I mean, if you can imagine 20 years without having a winning season, so you have players who, during the course of their lifetime, Independence has never had even a winning season. And when they’re losing, they’re not just losing by a little; they’re losing by a lot.

So you have a town — it’s almost this perfect storm. This town that’s full of civic pride, they have plenty of other things to be excited about, and here is this college that at least from the football team, they’d rather just forget. And Coach Brown has got this season to sort of prove them otherwise.

MM: How much did former five-star Florida State QB Malik Henry’s storyline add to the season?

GW: We’re sort of learning this as we go.

It probably comes as no surprise that the quarterback — it’s sort of an advantage when he has an interesting story. Because during the game and even during the practice week, he’s such a central part to the team that it sort of makes it easy to tie in practice footage, game footage, drama that surrounds the team into what we think is the true meaning of Last Chance U, which is to tell really interesting backstories of these kids.

And I think we’ve been blessed for the last three years to have quarterbacks that have really great and interesting backstories, and Malik is no exception.

MM: How different was the access at EMCC and Independence? And how did Coach Brown add to that access?

Well, we had a lot of access at EMCC. I think because of Buddy’s temperament, sometimes that access would fluctuate. But it was still a level of access that most filmmakers would be envious of on other projects.

With Coach Brown, it just never changed. There was never a time in which I asked if we could film and he said no.

And for me personally, it was unprecedented. I think I’ve enjoyed pretty remarkable access, whether it was Mitt Romney running for President or other films that I’ve made. But Coach Brown is a whole other level. He was completely an open book.

And I think he is someone that you could — especially at first glance, because we used a lot of moments early on with Coach Brown to grab the viewer’s’ attention — you can make the mistake of concluding that he’s performing for the camera. But as the series goes on and as you would see and, especially in my experience as the filmmaker, he was not performing; that’s who he is.

He is a larger-than-life person who is kind of an open book. I just couldn’t have had a better documentary subject in terms of that kind of accessibility and authenticity on and off the camera.