One year ago, a Metro Sports producer named Stephen Spiegel put the &ldquo;league&rdquo; in &ldquo;beleaguered.&rdquo;</p><p>With his documentary &ldquo;CityBall,&rdquo; Spiegel introduced cable viewers &mdash; who are accustomed to watching the games of Olathe North, Bishop Miege, Blue Springs and other suburban athletic powerhouses on Metro Sports &mdash; to the realities of high school sports inside the cash-strapped, crisis-riddled Kansas City School District.</p><p>Funny thing, though. I&rsquo;ve seen more than my share of documentaries about inner-city education, and &ldquo;CityBall&rdquo; is the most optimistic one I&rsquo;ve ever seen. In part because Spiegel decided to dig deep and tell a story that was about more than just a handful of inspiring student-athletes, and in part because of pure luck, viewers come away from &ldquo;CityBall&rdquo; convinced that the once-proud Interscholastic League may one day rise again.</p><p>On Tuesday, Spiegel and the kids who agreed to let him film their lives for a year will reunite for a town hall style meeting, and DVDs of the documentary will go on sale. It recently won a Mid-America regional Emmy for best cultural documentary.</p><p>One of the chronic problems with getting kids in Kansas City excited about sports is the shortage of good youth programs before high school, so the DVD sale profits will fund a new CityBall Scholarship Fund to send kids to sports camps.</p><p>Of course, the larger problem is that many kids in the Kansas City School District have things to worry about other than athletics &mdash; things that would boggle the minds of their counterparts in more affluent school districts.</p><p>&ldquo;CityBall&rdquo; introduces us to Akeem Curns, a running back for Lincoln Prep who told Spiegel one day that his whole family had been evicted and was now piled into a relative&rsquo;s small house. Then there was Ieshia Cabine, a forward on Paseo Academy&rsquo;s girls&rsquo; basketball team, whose mother left for Atlanta with medical problems. She started living on her own.</p><p>Individual stresses are bad enough, but then there are institutional stresses: Paseo phased out sports, so Ieshia was playing on a team that wouldn&rsquo;t even exist the next season. At Southeast High, Antoine Day rustled up 16 classmates so the school could have a football team and he could have a crack at a full-ride athletic scholarship. (Only a small number of Interscholastic Leaguers sign letters of intent each year.)</p><p>Through it all, not only do the students persevere, we actually see a support system growing around them. Spiegel picked almost a perfect time to start making &ldquo;CityBall.&rdquo; He told me that he had actually not covered an IL game for Metro Sports for over a year when he began mulling over a big documentary project. So he got assigned to a game and at halftime wandered over to the stands to chat with spectators.</p><p>&ldquo;And literally the first person I talked to was Ed Corporal, who was on his first or second day on the job as the Kansas City School District athletic director,&rdquo; Spiegel said. &ldquo;We talked about his goals, my goals, and the project went from there. He wrote his name down on a napkin. I still have it in one of my folders. I realized, &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve got to do this &hellip; and I&rsquo;ve got to do it right.&rsquo;</p><p>&ldquo;He said, &lsquo;Shoot whatever you need.&rsquo; He and the others I talked to were just excited that someone was telling their story. When people talk about inner-city athletics, it&rsquo;s usually in a negative light. And they usually aren&rsquo;t talking about the athletes at all.&rdquo;