If you take in any Sacramento Republic FC matches this summer, you may see some familiar faces on the video board during stoppages. As part of Sacramento State’s new partnership with the Republic, fans will be treated to a 30-second montage featuring a few of the individuals we’re proud to say were “Made at Sac State.”
The perfect time to check out the commercial – and the Republic – in person is this Saturday with your fellow Hornet alums. The Sac State Alumni Association is sponsoring “Sac State Alumni Night at Sacramento Republic FC,” and you can get more details about the event and purchase tickets on the Alumni Association’s Facebook page.
Check out the video above and see who you recognize. You can take a look at all of our Made at Sac State Profiles at csus.edu/made.
The day after their beloved Golden State Warriors won the NBA Finals, twin brothers Dominic ’11 (Marketing) and Donte ’11 (General Management) Morris were taking a bit of a victory lap of their own. During an interview with Capital Public Radio on June 13, they said that their pickup basketball app, Hoop Maps, now has more than 50,000 users.
The app lets people find pickup basketball games anywhere in the world, and earlier this year was featured in news outlets ranging from Sacramento’s CBS 13 to ESPN. But the success of Hoop Maps has not entirely been a shock, they told Capital Public Radio, given how hard they worked before launching to get feedback from actual pickup game players.
“Once it was built out, the spike of users wasn’t a surprise to us because we went out there and tested it on the ground to see how people accepted it,” Dominic said. “Sacramento is a real bustling pickup town, but you have markets like New York where it’s actually our most successful market, where there are … so many people looking for games. So we’re learning different markets now, and how to address different markets.”
The brothers say they hope to duplicate the app’s basketball success in other sports, such as soccer, tennis, and golf.
Award-winning filmmaker and Sacramento State alumnus Ryan Coogler ’07 (Business) has lined up his next project, and he’ll be working with a familiar face. Wrong Answer, the true story of an Atlanta high school standardized test cheating scandal, will feature frequent Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan in a starring role and a screenplay written by acclaimed author Ta-Nehesi Coates, Deadline reported this week.
The film will be based off of a 2014 The New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv that detailed what has been called the largest academic cheating scandal in American history. Jordan will play Damany Lewis, one of several teachers who joined efforts to revise the standardized test scores of their underrepresented students upward in order to save the school from closure.
Wrong Answer will be the fourth collaboration between Coogler and Jordan. They previously worked together on Fruitvale Station, which examined the fatal shooting of Oakland resident Oscar Grant III by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer, and Creed, a Rocky franchise sequel focusing on the son of Apollo Creed. Jordan also will appear in Coogler’s upcoming superhero film Black Panther.
Coogler was a star on the football field before an injury led him to think about his life beyond athletics. That’s when he found his passion for film making, a passion that was nurtured by his Sac State professors.
“They put me on the path and gave me the tools to be successful,” Coogler said in 2015 of his early mentors. “Business was helpful; they do call it the ‘film business.’ ”
