‘Opened my eyes to the struggle.’ Film tackles race, rugby and diversity at NC college

In two years, Frank McKinney not only built a rugby team from scratch in Charlotte, he coached his players to become the best Division II men’s rugby team in the country for Queens University of Charlotte.

McKinney led the Royals to their first USA-Rugby Division II National Championship in 2019, defeating the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater 74-8. The Queens men’s rugby team remained formidable — it was ranked No. 1 in Division I-AA Men’s Rugby this month, according to Goff Rugby Report.

“Scrum” is a new documentary about the team directed by Thomas Morgan of the film company Square Zero Films. It shares the story of the challenges McKinney and the players faced as he worked to build the first varsity men’s rugby team in North Carolina.

Morgan, who has been friends with McKinney for over 25 years, initially went to Charlotte to capture film for McKinney’s recruiting efforts.

“I started speaking to some of the players of his team,” Morgan said. “And as I spoke to more of his players and heard the stories, and as I started asking (McKinney) questions about the struggles to get these kids through school… I knew we had to do something bigger than just a recruiting video.”

The documentary premiered at an NCAAP event Oct. 10 in Santa Clarita, Calif., and debuted in Charlotte at the Charlotte Film Festival on Oct. 15, where it won the Audience Award for Documentary Feature.

“I never planned on being in a movie, so it’s been surreal,” McKinney said. “My life’s dream was just to coach good young men.”

Behind ’Scrum’

McKinney was a reluctant subject at first.

“I really didn’t think I had a story. I was coaching a Division II school, and there are a lot of coaches out there,” McKinney said.

“I told him, let’s just go for a little bit and see what happens,” Morgan said. “And as we got further and further into it, I think he started to see what I was seeing. He had become so normalized to his journey, he didn’t even think twice about it.”

“Scrum” is a rugby term that involves players packed together and pushing forward to gain possession of the ball.

The film spotlights a few team members — many of whom are first-generation college students and some of whom are from immigrant families — and highlighting the odds they overcame to attend college and play for McKinney.

Martin Pierce, now a senior, is from Athens, Tenn., a small town in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

“I went to McMinn County High School. Our class was about 500. Only about 20 of us went to college,” he said in the film. “If I didn’t go to school, I probably would have found my way into trouble.”

In Maryland, teammate Alex Balladares hears his mother rehash her initial concerns about sending her Latino son down South to play for McKinney. “Coming to this country and trying to assimilate, and having such a difficult time — we didn’t want them to have that,” she said in the film.

Having only spoken with McKinney on the phone, she did not know his race. He is Black.

“The mom said to me: ‘My son is brown... and he’s coming to the South. I’m a little worried.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s a good thing the coach is brown, too,“ McKinney said in the film.

A pivotal moment

In 2020, after winning the national title, and while the film was still in production, George Floyd was killed. It proved a pivotal moment for McKinney.

“It totally hit me,” he said. “I had worked to get this diverse team of guys together who were all different. I knew we had to talk about race in this movie.”

Morgan agreed, and said he was surprised at how much he learned about his longtime friend while making the film.

“In 26 years of friendship, there were so many struggles I didn’t know about,” Morgan said. “We started having difficult conversations about race that we had never had. It opened my eyes to the struggle.”

The film shows photos from McKinney’s time on the rugby team at Belmont Abbey College in the early 1990s, and then with the Charlotte Rugby Club, where he played from 1993-2008.

He’s the only Black person in most of the photos.

Morgan pointed out scenes in the film in which a pensive McKinney stares into the distance, deep in thought. “That feels very lonely to me,” Morgan said.

The film also addresses McKinney’s internal emotional struggle with making his no-nonsense Navy veteran father proud.

“My dad never really said, ‘I love you,’ a lot or ‘I’m proud of you.’ He just didn’t say those things,” McKinney said.

For Morgan, drawing out that storyline was important.

“So many men will see themselves in that conversation,” Morgan said. “One guy told me that his father — as they were watching — shut the movie off and said, ‘Son, I’m proud of you. And I love you.’ And those are words he had never uttered in his life.

“It was so much a part of Frank’s life, that it had to be in the movie.”

Before the film, McKinney and his father never really had that conversation. “Now we’ve had it multiple times,” he said. “The movie has brought my dad and I closer together.”

To watch ‘Scrum’

Visit: https://99goodfilms.com/pages/scrum

Cost: $12

This story is part of an Observer underwriting project with the Thrive Campaign for the Arts, supporting arts journalism in Charlotte.

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This story was originally published November 9, 2021 at 6:45 AM.