Movie shines light on the man who invented the jump shot — and who also revolutionized girls high school basketball in Alaska

Jeannette Sutherland of Glennallen still remembers making the half-court buzzer shot at the end of the 1971 state basketball championship game in Palmer. She remembers the referee blowing his whistle and waving off the potential game-winner, saying Sutherland had traveled before the shot. She remembers how heartbreaking the loss was, coming in the final game of her high school career and ending her team’s long winning streak at either 67 or 68 games (the one detail she isn’t sure of).

Sutherland also remembers her coach’s demeanor through that and every other game during her four seasons with the Glennallen Panthers. Always encouraging, never angry.

“The girls pretty much worshipped the ground he walked on,” she said.

The coach was Kenny Sailors, who was born nearly 100 years ago and is finding new fame as the subject of a documentary film making its online premiere this week, four years after his death in 2016 at the age of 95.

Sailors’ claim to fame is the jump shot — the now-ubiquitous shooting technique Sailors invented out of necessity back in 1934 when he was playing one-on-one against a much taller brother as a teenager in Hillsdale, Wyoming.

“Jump Shot: The Kenny Sailors Story” is available online for 72 hours beginning Thursday. Steph Curry, the best jump-shooter on the planet right now, is an executive producer.

Basketball historians have long known about Sailors — MVP of the 1943 NCAA Tournament for leading the University of Wyoming to the national championship and a player in the early years of the NBA, when he played for several teams including the Boston Celtics.

He and his wife, Marilynne, lived in Alaska for 34 years, from 1965 to 1999. They came here so Sailors could work as a big-game outfitter and guide, and he wasn’t here long before he also became a volunteer coach at Glennallen, where he helped pioneer and popularize girls basketball at a time when few athletic opportunities existed for high school girls in Alaska.

“He started girls high school basketball in Alaska,” said Sutherland, who was interviewed for the documentary.

The film has been well-received at film festivals, something director Jacob Hamilton chalks up to an appeal that goes beyond basketball.

Viewers “come for the basketball but they walk away with so much more,” Hamilton, who lives in Austin, Texas, said in a phone interview this week.

“Most people don’t know Kenny Sailors and the life he lived," Hamilton said. “It was an impressive life. … I wanted to tell a story of a man of faith, a guide and outfitter, a husband, a father, a Marine, an advocate for women’s sports — all of those things that make Kenny Sailors."

In the early days of basketball, shooters used both hands and kept both feet on the hardwood when shooting the ball. Some might have jumped an inch or two, but it was Sailors who is credited for being the first to launch shots in mid-air with a couple of feet separating him from the gym floor.

When Life Magazine ran a photograph in 1946 of Sailors taking a jumper at Madison Square Garden, the photo inspired players all over the country to try the technique. It revolutionized the game.

A couple decades later, Sailors came to Alaska and revolutionized girls high school basketball.

“When I first went up there, they didn’t have any sports for girls in the schools,” Sailors said in a 2010 article in the Laramie (Wyoming) Boomerang newspaper. “There was no money...no tax base...before the pipeline,” Sailors said. "I had a daughter, and she was a pretty good athlete, and that disturbed me.

“… The old superintendent there at Glennallen said that one of the things he wanted to do was get girls sports going in high school, especially basketball. We started out playing that half-court nonsense the girls used to play, and they had those bloomer things they wore. So I told him right off, 'We have to get rid of that stuff or change the rules.'

“We were going to play like the boys because that was a bunch of nonsense. And the girls liked that so much better.”

According to a University of Wyoming story written after Sailor’s death, the girls program in Glennallen was first in an Alaska public school. Sailors also helped create a statewide tournament for girls and coached the Panthers to three state titles and a 68-game winning streak from 1965-74 (although Sutherland thinks it the winning streak might have ended at 67).

In 1987, Kenny and Marilynne moved to Angoon in Southeast Alaska so Sailors could explore new hunting grounds. He wound up coaching the girls high school team and compiled a three-year record of 53-15, according to his obituary.

In 1999, Kenny and Marilynne returned to the Lower 48, where Marilynne died in 2002 after 59 years of marriage.

A number of relatives still live in Alaska, including the Gerlach family of Gakona, where the Sailors homesteaded way back when.

Kelly Gerlach, his granddaughter, remembers going to the Spenard Rec Center in Anchorage with Sailors when she was a little girl. The gym’s regular players initially dismissed the girl and her grandfather until they saw both of them could play.

“All the family is athletic,” said Hamilton, the film’s director. That certainly applies to great-granddaughter Briahna Gerlach, who won four straight Class 1-2-3A cross country state championships for the Glennallen Panthers and now competes at Abilene Christian. When “Jump Shot” made its world premier at last year’s SXSW Festival in Austin, Kelly and Briahna joined Hamilton on stage for questions, Hamilton said.

“I’m thrilled with the movie,” Kelly Gerlach said. “I wasn’t too sure what a young kid from Austin would do.”

Hamilton, 35, said he learned about Sailors about 10 years ago when he heard a two-minute audio interview in which Sailors talked about the evolution of the jump shot. Hamilton was a cinematographer looking for short-film ideas, and Sailors’ story stuck with him.

He spent five years on the project, which started with a seven-minute short film released in 2012. That film led to the 79-minute movie that Steph Curry got involved with.

Curry and other players, including Kevin Durant and Dirk Nowitzki, appear in the movie. None of them knew about Sailors until they saw the short film, but what they learned made them want to participate in the feature film, Hamilton said.

The movie was scheduled to premier in theaters earlier this month, but that didn’t happen because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, it will be available during a 72-hour span that begins Thursday on a video platform called Altavod. The movie costs $7.99 and it comes with a 48-hour viewing window once your rental begins.

Hamilton said a portion of the proceeds will go to Convoy of Hope, an organization that provides meals to American families affected by COVID-19.

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