Brick x Brick with JCSU Women's Basketball

Nine players. Midseason coaching change. A program trying to figure out what it is and what it wants to be. Wali Pitt and HBCU Gameday showed up and filmed all of it.

Brick x Brick with JCSU Women's Basketball is a five-part series following the Johnson C. Smith Golden Bulls through the 2024-2025 season. The same embedded access that made the football version compelling gets applied here to women's hoops. Practice footage, locker room conversations, in-game moments that nobody staged.

The DNA

HBCU Gameday started building this format with the football program. The idea was simple and harder to execute than it sounds: show up, stay, capture what actually happens. Not a highlight package. Not a produced segment with music and slow motion stitched together after the fact. The real thing.

Coach Monterika Warren is the center of the basketball series. The camera follows the program's daily reality, which in this case meant a season where the roster stayed thin and the staff changed midway through. The series doesn't clean that up. It keeps it in.

What HBCU Gameday Is Building

Wali Pitt has been making this kind of content for HBCU programs since HBCU Gameday launched in 2012. The football Brick x Brick series ran 19 episodes across three seasons. Over seven total hours. A program that went from two wins a season to a CIAA championship and NCAA playoff appearance, documented in real time as it happened.

The women's basketball series is the same framework applied to a different sport and a different set of stakes. A roster under pressure, a new coaching situation, games that matter. The title "brick x brick" refers to how you build something that lasts. The series is about whether that's actually happening.

Charlotte and What It Means

Johnson C. Smith sits in Charlotte. That's part of the story whether the series addresses it directly or not. The city has grown significantly over the past decade. JCSU's campus is in a neighborhood that has changed around it. There's weight to the question of what an HBCU program becomes when the surrounding context shifts, and what kind of stories get made about those programs.

HBCU Gameday has consistently been one of the few outlets producing this kind of longform storytelling for HBCU sports. The production is lean. The cameras are there because Pitt decided to be there, not because a network commissioned it. That shows in what gets captured.

The Feature Coming Next

A feature documentary centered on JCSU's football championship season is currently in post-production. Not Done Yet covers the CIAA championship run and the NCAA playoff appearance. Slated for streaming release later this summer. The women's basketball series is the bridge while that comes together.

Sports & Fitness

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Streaming now on Relay.