Long before becoming a TV producer, Peter Rudman was a star basketball player at Highland Park High School in the mid-1980s. Last fall Rudman and his partner, Rashid Ghazi, approached the cable channel Fox Sports Network to propose a reality program that would follow the lives of three high school basketball stars, from Chicago, New York, and LA, through an entire season.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Their local hero would be Eddy Curry from Calumet City. The six-eleven senior plays center for Thornwood High School in South Holland, the state’s top-rated boys basketball team, and he’s one of the leading high school prospects in the country. He’s been projected as a lottery pick, one of the first 13 selections in the NBA draft, though he’s already made an oral commitment to play for DePaul’s Blue Demons this fall.
Halo Sports finalized its deal with Fox in mid-December, and according to Rudman it had to move quickly to assemble the creative and production team. The company has rented a 5,000-square-foot space near Loyola University and hired 40 people, including three writer-producers, seven director-cameramen, and six editors. Some of the directors focus on games and team practices, some on the players’ private lives, working with digital video cameras that require little natural light and enable them to shoot in tight spaces like locker rooms or team huddles. Rudman estimates that by the time the 65 episodes are completed, he’ll have amassed nearly 1,300 hours of footage.
