A documentary about the Watersmeet high school basketball team--and the people who intensely support it--will premiere on The Sundance Channel, Monday, Nov. 26, from 8 to 9 pm., CST. Episodes will air on four successive Mondays through Dec. 17. The entire series will be rebroadcast from 2 to 6 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 22.

    “Nimrod Nation” loosely follows the fortunes of the Watersmeet boys’ basketball team through the 2005-2006 season. Along the way it paints an unvarnished portrait of everyday life in a rugged northwoods town, the good, the bad, the indifferent.
   
    Log milling, deer hunting, ice fishing and headcheese-making were surely foreign to the New York City producers who spent a long winter working in and around Watersmeet.

    “No, I didn’t try the headcheese,” laughs Adam Pincus, executive producer. “But we fell in love with Watersmeet. I’d never seen a place like that before. The U.P. felt like a special place far away. Lost in time. It didn’t feel like the modern America we see virtually everywhere, with chain stores and big boxes and all the other modern things we have, for better or worse.”

    Three film crews of 3-6 people were deployed to cover basketball games and to shadow residents who agreed to cooperate. Jeff Zelinski was one of them.
   
    “They filmed me in my underwear,” he proudly says, describing just how much latitude some of these crews were given. “My wife gave me that set of wool long johns 27 years ago. They’re a lot like me--old and wore out.

    “None of this was scripted,” adds Zelinski, a logger, dirt hauler and Nimrod graduate from 1973. “They’d didn’t tell us what to do. They’d meet us in the morning and ask, ‘OK, what are we going to do today?’ I’d tell them, ‘I think we’ll do some hog butchering.’ They’d say, ‘Give us 10 minutes to set up.’”

    The documentary is told without narration. Instead, the story is carried through the words of the characters and spare, effective editing.

    “We decided to run the cameras, be observers and trust the people to tell the story,” Pincus says. “The goal was to show the audience a world they haven’t seen on TV before. Very authentic, real, dramatic. We hope the audience will care about these people, and for a short time, want to become part of their lives.”
   
    Was it awkward being shadowed by a film crew for five months?  “At first it was,” Zelinski says, “but after a week we became friends. Everybody was personable, trustworthy and fun to be with. They ate their meals with us and were welcome in our home day and night. Sundance sent the right people here.”
   
    “That was deliberate,” Pincus says. “We spent a lot of time selecting the proper individuals.  The biggest criterion was that they didn’t come with any preconceptions about what this town or the people would be like. We didn’t want someone from a reality TV background who would exploit these people for TV value. Someone who would break that trust and take advantage.”

    The film crews lived in two rented homes on a lake in northern Wisconsin. Bent’s camp, in Land O’ Lakes was a favorite dining spot. Familiar scenes from that community, as well as Eagle River, Lac du Flambeau and other northwoods towns appear throughout  the series.

    Nimrod Nation was spun out of some ESPN commercials that aired during Super Bowl week, 2003. The idea behind that ad campaign was to underscore how much athletic competition means in American life.
 
    Freelance producer Brett Morgen looked for high schools with unusual mascot names, and, not surprisingly, seized on the Nimrods. “Without sports,” the ads asked, “who would cheer for the Nimrods?”
 
    Rooted in the Book of Genesis, the figure Nimrod is a mighty hunter. More recent colloquial use has, of course, twisted the name to mean bumbling idiot. These days the term has produced plenty of attention for Watersmeet Township School. After the commercials aired, team members and Coach George Peterson appeared on CBS’ Early Show, then The Tonight Show.

    Since 2004, more than $550,000 worth of Nimrod apparel has been sold--not bad for a K-12 program with 79 high school students. And those sales were racked up without even trying--enterprising customers tracked down Watersmeet Schools through the web.   
  
     “The school board directed these proceeds must go to benefit the kids, and only in specific ways,” says Peterson, who is principal.  “This caught us all by surprise. I get letters from people all over the world with pictures of them wearing Nimrod gear. There’s one on my wall from Australia…people pose at the most famous sites in Europe.”
   
    By 2005, producer Morgen sold the idea of a documentary to Sundance. He returned to Watersmeet, met with the school board and parents, and secured permission to make the series. A film crew was assigned to shadow Coach Peterson. What has he learned from the experience?

     “That show business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” he laughs. “Everybody assumes this is glamorous. I can assure you it’s not. A lot of time and effort goes into these shows. It is work. There were many sacrifices of time normally spent with family and friends, but it was for the kids, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

    “A crew followed me all day, every day. I’d go out at 7 on a Friday evening, and they’d say, ‘Where we going now, Coach?’ “I’d have to tell them, ‘WE aren’t going anywhere. I don’t want to see you guys again until Monday morning.’

    Constant attention made Peterson’s workdays more challenging as well.

    “Sometimes I had to shut the office door and tell the camera crews to go away for awhile, just to protect the students’ privacy. You can’t put some aspects of their lives out there for public consumption,” Peterson says. “To tell the truth, I once retreated into the bathroom to get away from them. When I came out they said, ‘Uh, Coach…next time you go in there, remember to shut your mike off.”

    As the 2005-06 basketball season unfolded, the Nimrods were trying to top their previous record of 25-2, forged by a scrappy team that made the school’s first appearance in state competition.

    “I’ve never been under such pressure as a coach,” Peterson says. “We lost two key seniors and had a big challenge in front of us. In the first six games we went 4-2, losing as many as we had the whole season before. A lot of people in town were mad at me. You add in the constant cameras and it meant many sleepless nights.”

    The Nimrods made a remarkable recovery during that memorable season. And though many of the players have graduated and moved on, the attention continues. Peterson was recently interviewed by The New York Times.

    One episode of Nimrod Nation that has generated early attention at film festivals deals with the relationship between the white people of Watersmeet and their neighbors in the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Chippewa Indians. “We have 50 percent Native American enrollment in our schools,” Peterson says.  “I hope they felt they were portrayed favorably.”

    According to Executive Producer Pincus, that aspect of Nimrod Nation held particular appeal to Robert Redford, creative director of The Sundance Channel. Redford didn’t work directly on the series, “but he was aware of it,” Pincus says.  “He likes opportunities to tell the Native American story, and he has a love for this kind of vanishing America. You don’t see that on television very often.”