BROTHERHOOD OF BASKETBALL

Albany filmmaker to release documentary on St. Bonaventure basketball program

The 1967-68 St. Bonaventure basketball team — with future NBA great Bob Lanier — finished the season with a 23-2 record and was ranked as high as No. 3 in the country. That team and the history of the program are part of a new documentary titled “Brown ’n White: The Heart of Bona’s Basketball,” by Albany filmmaker Michael Camoin. (Photo provided)

A story of faith, perseverance and community is coming to the screen this year.

Albany filmmaker Michael Camoin is in the final stages of production on his next project, a documentary series on how St. Bonaventure University, one of the smallest Catholic-Franciscan NCAA Division I college basketball programs, fought the odds to become one of the top teams in the 1960s.

Powered by faith and its Franciscan traditions, the series, titled “Brown ’n White: The Heart of Bona’s Basketball,” explores the unique history of the college’s basketball program, highlighting themes of faith, race and a brotherhood rooted in something bigger than themselves. 

“This story is leadership, teamwork, and building community, on and off the basketball court,” Camoin said in an interview with The Evangelist. 

In 1961, St. Bonaventure, with an integrated lineup, made its first trip to the NCAA Tournament. Camion said the team’s ability to hone its faith values and embrace the unity of brotherhood helped not only pave the way for future black basketball players but also for the college team’s own success.

“The motto of the Franciscans is, ‘All are welcome,’ ” Camoin said. “St. Francis, who we know as the peacemaker, said everything with brother and sister. It wasn’t hierarchical, it was horizontal. The relationship of siblings is a really unique relationship. No one sibling has domination over another, that’s a foundational Franciscan principle throughout.”

The documentary’s release comes at a perfect time: Pope Leo has declared 2026 a special Franciscan Jubilee year, marking the 800th anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi’s death, and recently celebrated the anniversary of cinema, meeting with film directors and actors in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican in November 2025. 

During his meeting, the pope said that “good cinema and those who create and star in it have the power to recover the authenticity of imagery in order to safeguard and promote human dignity.”

A 1988 graduate of St. Bonaventure, Camoin’s latest project is one close to his heart. Camoin got the idea for the project during his 30-year college reunion in 2018 while visiting the campus in Western New York just off Route 86 near Alleghany State Park. 

For a while, there was some distance between Camoin and his alma mater. He stopped following the school’s basketball team after scandal rocked the program in 2003. The Atlantic 10 Conference stripped the St. Bonaventure team of six league victories and barred it from conference postseason play after it came to light that a player was ineligible to play, violating NCAA transfer guidelines. The scandal forced the program’s athletic director on administrative leave and the university’s president to resign. 

But things felt different for Camoin when back on campus. 

“The (St. Bonaventure) basketball program had just beaten UCLA (in a First Four game of the NCAA Tournament), and I asked, ‘How did we turn things around?’ ” he said. “Because of the scandal in 2003 of the basketball program and the church, I had grown distant from my university and my church. Yet I was interested in how the program turned things around.”

Camoin said the more he dug into the program, the more he was “invited to go back into the past” of his college, “into the great teams of the 1950s that produced professional players.”

“I knew there were banners hanging from the Reilly Center, which is the gym for the university,” he said, “I never knew who those banners represented, and I didn’t even know their stories.”

Camoin’s documentary interviews some of the key players from St. Bonaventure’s team from the 1950s to the 2000s, including the school’s first black varsity player, Sam Stith, who came from St. Francis Prep in Brooklyn. Stith, along with his brother Tom, had led their high school to two national titles.

“What these guys did, they broke ground and allowed other players to follow beyond historically black colleges,” Camoin said. “Guys started to get recruited by other Catholic schools and Catholic colleges and public schools from the South started to as a result.”

The film also features interviews with former NBA player Fred Crawford, St. Bonaventure Class of 1964, and Bonaventure graduate Billy Kalbaugh, a graduate from Central Catholic High School in Troy, who was co-captain of the university’s NCAA Final Four team of 1970.

The documentary’s anticipated release is building attraction, including from Cardinal Christophe Pierre, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, who responded to Camoin’s letter announcing the upcoming film.

“It was very affirming as a storyteller,” Camoin said. “This is a cinematic mission that aligns with the Catholic Church, that means a lot to me.”

Camoin is currently fundraising to finalize the remaining episodes in the series and hopes to submit the project to major film festivals later this year.

“History is a mirror to the future, and if we polish off that mirror, we can learn some really great lessons and pass them onto the next generation,” he said. “Sports is a way to weave our nation’s history, civil rights and a faith-infused message around brotherhood.”

For more information about “Brown ’n White: The Heart of Bona’s Basketball,” visit https://www.brownwhitestory.com/.