Shoni Schimmel was like many other teenage girls with a gift for the game of basketball. Ranked among the top 100 high school players in the country, she practiced and played hard and hoped for a Division I athletic scholarship. But Shoni, a Umatilla Indian, faced the unique challenge of living on a reservation and the sense of isolation that created.
The documentary film “Off the Rez,” which premiered Tuesday evening at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and will be shown on TLC on May 14, chronicles Shoni’s junior and senior years of high school and the decision by her parents, Cecilee Moses and Rick Schimmel, to move the family off the Umatilla Indian Reservation so Shoni could get the kind of athletic exposure she needed. Moses, once a gifted basketball player and track athlete, accepted a job coaching girls’ basketball at Franklin High School in Portland, Ore.
Under Moses’ guidance and with Shoni and younger sister Jude playing, the team goes from being an underdog to owning a winning record. The film showcases Shoni’s flourishing talents on the court, and the pressure of increased expectations off of it. It also shows the young athlete dealing with the financial strain her college hoops dream puts on her family.
On the upside, the move did increase Shoni’s national exposure, as college recruitment letters began arriving almost daily. The desire was for Shoni to go to one of the best college programs in the country, someplace where she could win, which has happened.
“For Shoni and her family, the goal was to be able to deal with the outside world and to achieve in the outside world without changing who you are inside and without losing or abandoning values,” says the film’s director, Jonathan Hock.
Schimmel’s story reveals a great deal about the barriers — external and internal — that have prevented many American Indians with talent from getting athletic scholarships. Hock says even he was shocked by how stark reservation life is and how enormous the psychological gulf is between people living on and off the reservation.
One of those who tells the story most poignantly is Schimmel’s cousin, Billy Quaempts, an extraordinary basketball player in the early 1970s who was unable to take that step to college. Quaempts received letters from several colleges, but he says he honestly didn’t know what to do with them.
