Heart Wrenching Basketball Recruitment Documentary 'Rise Above' Launches for March Madness

'Rise Above: The Journey to College Basketball' - which tackles the volatile recruiting landscape and the daunting personal struggles of three high school players - has launched ahead of March Madness on AVOD platforms including Tubi and YouTube Movies and TV, YouTube’s AVOD platform, joining ProQuest, Visual Data, Watch Free Flix and Future Today.

The film spotlights the struggle of three Los Angeles area high school seniors as they vie for coveted scholarships from leading basketball programs, digging deep into their motivations, setbacks, and doubts to their long-held dreams. Emmy-winning production company Diesel Films founder Seth Shapiro co-directed the film with Eric Butts, who also cut the documentary.

'Rise Above' launches to Tubi’s nearly 80 million monthly viewers and YouTube Movies and TV’s 187M subscribers as of March 2025, scaling rapidly in competitive AVOD and TVOD markets. In a digital entertainment age of celebrity-driven content, real stories of regular kids chasing their dreams resonate with an audience hungry for authentic inspiration and hard-won lessons.

Background

The documentary follows three seniors from leading basketball programs competing for coveted scholarships. One student, Cord Stansberry - a talented Palm Desert guard with a basketball pedigree - faced the pressure of expectation amidst an increasingly competitive selection process. Meanwhile, Marco Kenz, a transfer student from Ghana with a student visa, would face returning to his home country if not accepted into a college program and potentially giving up his dream. Jaayden Bush, then a Long Beach point guard, was considered undersized. A single mother raised him alongside a brother with epilepsy. Unfortunately, mid-filming, his brother passed away. The pandemic also prompted an ultra-competitive recruitment year, where seniors were allowed to remain in college an extra year and held spots that normally would have gone to high school seniors.

Coming out of covid - and after creating the sports documentary podcast Beyond The Lens while isolating - executive producer Seth Shapiro from Diesel Films itched for a creative challenge and wanted to helm a documentary with a captivating, unsung story. He met Russell Payne--now an assistant coach for Cal State East Bay basketball, formerly the founder and CEO of Los Angeles Elite, an LA area independent AAU program. Together they collaborated on the foundational story of college basketball recruiting and the nuances of the process that catch many parents and players unaware. Taken together with the adversity each focus player faced in their personal lives, the documentary transformed beyond that of a simple sports story; it became a film about having faith through challenges and a blueprint for parents to guide them through college recruiting when their child may not have a national pedigree, five-star talent or wealth advantage to boost their chances.

Full disclosure: all three students did make it into a college program. Beyond their trials, the odds were already stacked against them; only 3.6% of high school boys basketball players go on to play college basketball at the NCAA level (Divisions I, II, or III), and only 1.0% of high school players play at the Division I level. From that already small percentage, only about 1% of college basketball players turn pro, and a microscopic 0.02-0.03% of high school players play in the NBA or WNBA. This means that out of every 10,000 high school players, only two or three will play professionally. Source

Notes Seth, “When I started creating the film, my kids were still pretty young. Now my 10-year-old plays club soccer, and my other daughter plays competitive tennis. In making the film I learned so much more about the ever-changing youth sports landscape. I’m positive other parents are in a similar situation--they don’t know what supporting their kids on the competitive sports track will be like. I want my film to educate and inspire them and their kids.”

Adds Russell, “We thought it was going to be like, ‘Hey, let’s follow the story of a few of these kids for the summer and see where they go to college’, but the story took shape, forming something that you would think would be in a Hollywood movie. It was crazy to think about how that transpired and the adversity these kids faced.”