Nurturing the fourth legacy

West Winnipeg

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This article was published 10/01/2024 (608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Following the debut of Winnipeg’s Canadian Elite Basketball League team, the Sea Bears, in May of 2023, a trio of digital film and media production students at RRC Polytech took it upon themselves to highlight the long history of local basketball as part of their coursework.

The completed mini-documentary, titled The Fourth Legacy, was uploaded to YouTube last month. The 16-minute-long film features interviews with Winnipeg basketball historian and former University of Winnipeg Wesmen head coach Ross Wedlake, as well as current Sea Bears players Simon Hildebrandt (also of the U of M Bisons) and Chad Posthumus.

Alongside celebrating the strong debut of the Sea Bears, who went to the CEBL final in their first season, the film tells the story of other well-known Winnipeg basketball teams — such as the Winnipeg Toilers, who won the Canadian Senior A men’s championships in 1926, 1927, and 1932 (and who were involved in a plane crash in 1933 that killed five people, including two players, and injured several others); the Winnipeg Thunder, which played in the World Basketball League and the National Basketball League; and the Winnipeg Cyclone, which played in the International Basketball Association from 1995 to 2001.

The students who created The Fourth Legacy are Rylan Dyck, A.J. Ellis and Thatcher Moore.

“It definitely was challenging, especially with just the amount of information that we had to cover,” said Dyck, the film’s director. “Because we’re covering over 100 years of history — basketball history and Manitoba.”

Dyck said the group drew a lot of inspiration from The Last Dance, a recent documentary on the Chicago Bulls.

“(We) just really wanted to make it just as digestible as we could, to allow the viewer to soak up all that information. Because again, there is a lot (of it).”

Dyck credited Wedlake for sharing his knowledge and helping shape the story.

“I think a really important takeaway was trying to just get all that information in one place, to be able to share it with Manitoba and with Winnipeg, so that history isn’t forgotten and left in the past,” Dyck said. “If I were just to make a piece on the Sea Bears, we would have been leaving all that history, those three previous teams behind.”

Dyck hopes to continue creating work like this in the future, he said, via his freelance brand, 5th Visuals.

The Fourth Legacy can be found on YouTube.