The California Institute of Technology is routinely ranked as one of the ten best universities in the nation by just about any standard. The science and engineering school boasts one of the highest numbers of Nobel Prize winners among its alumni and is home to a NASA lab. Academically, there are few other colleges that measure up.
But when it comes to athletics, well, the stereotype that a nerd can't play sports seems particularly apt.
The Caltech Beavers, a Division III NCAA basketball team, holds the dubious record of longest conference losing streak ever — 21 years and 259 games long.
Quantum Hoops is a lighthearted look at the predicament of the Beavers. It's a documentary that's short on depth, but as far as inspirational sports stories go, I'll take it over the scores of Hoosiers clones that continue to clutter the megaplexes any day.
On paper, the Caltech Beavers make for an unusual, if not entirely compelling tale. How can a basketball team be this bad?
But in reality, it's not that difficult to see why. Caltech offers no athletic scholarships, has fewer than 1,000 undergraduates from which to select its players and on the 2006-07 team featured in the film, there are only six players that have even played high school basketball. Only six, and none of the seniors are among them. Clearly, Quantum Hoops has no reason to try to explore what makes the Beavers so bad. It's clear why they suck.
Fortunately, the filmmakers understand this, and never go down this route of exploration. They stick to a wide range of interviews from the current team and players from the last five decades. But there's just not much room for these interviews to be that enlightening — the current players offer fairly obvious platitudes about how their future career will not be in basketball (no kidding) and the former players seem content to mostly reminisce about the past.
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