It’s peak season for American Football fans. The NFL season is in full swing and British fans have crowded in to the first two of the four games being played in London. There’s lots of action on TV. The BBC carry highlights programmes, Sky Sports are showing five games a week plus features while there are American College and Canadian games on BT Sport.
Documentaries are popular too. NFL Films yearly series for HBO, ‘Hard Knocks’, is hotly anticipated every pre-season and there’s also the ‘All or Nothing’ series on Amazon Prime which follows a team through the year. While the strictly amateur British league is in its off-season Scotland’s best established club, East Kilbride Pirates, has been getting the fly-on-the-wall treatment too.
The team have dropped from being rated as the third best in Britain to being relegated from the Premier Division in 2018. Film maker Andy Mackintosh has followed their 2019 season and his documentary ‘Return to the Top’ tells the story of their year chasing promotion back to the top division.
While this is his first film, Andy isn’t an outsider in American Football. He has years of experience in the game as a player and a coach. In fact he was head coach at East Kilbride Pirates before going on to work at a college in the States.
He says “Sports make a great subject for documentary as they they have that built in drama/conflict as teams try to win and overcome obstacles together. Because the seasons have less games than almost any other sport, in American football each game is that much more vital. I thought there were lots of interesting points in the Pirates season as they had just been relegated and changed head coaches. How would they cope with the change and could they bounce back or fold under the pressure?”
‘Return to the Top’ is being premiered in Glasgow on 14th November and, at the time of writing, there are still a few tickets available. Click here for info.