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.
But there is something interesting that comes across in these interviews and that's how unrelentingly genial every single player is about the whole thing. Almost every player across the span of the basketball program had to endure some type of gargantuan losing streak if not the current monster one, but Caltech basketball memories are all pleasant for these guys.
In a school known for its academic rigor, basketball isn't so much a competitive activity as it is a diversion from the heavy workload Caltech is known for. It's quite inspiring to see the dedication the players have toward their schoolwork, but also toward basketball. The film spends a good deal of its running time padding the story with plenty of Caltech anecdotes and a detailed history of its athletic programs, but it's all pretty interesting.
As for the supposed point of the film—the huge losing streak—it tends to take a backseat much of the time, leading to an unfocused and meandering movie at times, but it's able to grab our attention back with the final 20 minutes. Caltech is playing its last game of the season—a game where it actually stands a chance to win. Drama doesn't exactly run high at this point, but how could you not want these guys to finally win a game?
Quantum Hoops is not emotionally rich or poignant, but it manages to be fairly interesting, and at under 90 minutes, it doesn't overstep its bounds. The DVD comes with two commentary tracks and a short featurette on the women's basketball team.
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