Football is a billion-dollar industry. It has grown by leaps and bounds since its creation. The last few decades have made it one of the biggest industries in the world. Fans and everyone in between turned professional, college, high school, and youth football into more than just a sport. Everyone wanted their piece of the pie. Including crooks who didn’t care if kids were used in making their money and didn’t get an education in the process. A scheme wasn’t a scheme if you say your doing it for the kids and their future.

Roy Johnson is from New York City. He was a washed-up football player who had dreams of playing for Ohio St. as his brother did. The next best thing for washed-up or retired Football players to keep scratching that itch is coaching. Roy got an insurance settlement that allowed him to continue his dream. He also convinced a local Ohio Christian School, Christians of Faith Academy,  to buy into his scam. This was the precursor of the team, Bishop Sycamore, in question in this documentary that played a game against IMG Academy, out of Daytona Beach Florida, on ESPN at the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton Ohio. 

Roy was a shyster.  He lied to various people including the players he recruited to play for his team. He never set up a school for these kids to get an education or any kind of structure for them when they weren’t practicing,  playing games, or traveling to and from games. He had them living in hotels that he never paid to bill for. They were eating at restaurants and fast food places that they would sometimes not pay the bill for. This man was nothing but a fraud and he hurt these kids way more than he ever helped them. 

The documentary uses a lot of popular techniques that other documentaries use. Such as talking heads of many of this man’s players and ex-coaches Andre Peterson, assistant coach director and father of a player on the team, Trillian Harris team QB Adrian “Pahokee” Brown Jr. Cornerback Mario Agyen Running Back  Justin JD Daniel Tackle, Bomani Jones an ESPN Journalist, Ben Ferry investigator of high school sports in Ohio and Mike & Anthony the videographers of the team. All of these people discussed the true story behind this man and his fake team.

I’ve been involved in high school sports for quite some time before becoming a film critic. I live in Florida where IMG Academy is and they are a school, if you want to call them that, that specializes in sports. Their kids get just enough education that makes them eligible to play sports and qualify for school. They are just one of many quote-en-quote schools that do this in Florida. There are dozens of Christian Schools as well that barely pass for educational institutes.  This film was nothing new to me because I saw this going on all the time in Florida. The only difference is these teams weren’t caught doing questionable things like Roy Johnson was.

The directors Trovan Free and Martin Desmond Roe go all out to show this man was a complete fraud but they also wanted to show the cost of what he did to the players that played for him. They got into this big game because of a special high school game scheduler but when they played in the game a lot of players got hurt. They had lasting injuries for years and in some instances, they couldn’t get into college because they didn’t have high school transcripts to show schools. These kids were damaged for years after this and it’s sad to see this happen, but it happens all over the country.

BS High isn’t about just this man and this game that was on ESPN. It was about lying and using the system to ruin kids’ lives. The country wants the next great football team and players and this situation was allowed to happen because of this need for football to succeed. The problem is like all criminals this man was bound to be caught and this team was bound to be discovered as a fraud along with its coach.  The film does a good job of getting to the bottom of this story but it’s nothing special as far as I’m concerned. This sort of thing happens all the time in big football hotbeds like Florida, Texas, California, and Ohio.

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen