by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

By the time that Richard Linklater’s 2016 college baseball comedy Everybody Wants Some!! came out, he’d be noodling the idea for over a decade. It had also been over twenty years since its spiritual predecessor, Dazed and Confused, had hit the film scene and really put Linklater on the map as a creative force.

Largely about a college freshman, Everybody Wants Some!! is set during the three days between freshmen moving into college, and the start of classes. We follow Jake (played by Blake Jenner) as he does just that, moving into one of the two houses that the baseball team occupies off campus. There’s the promise of a “team only” baseball practice at the end of a long weekend of meeting teammates and partying, with the looming (though not in a bad way) prospect of school actually starting.

The majority of Linklater’s career, especially when he acts as screenwriter, can generally be described as “little plot, mostly vibes.” I wrote about Dazed and Confused for my year-long teen column in 2021, where I talked about its place as a coming-of-age flick. And I think it’s pretty clear why Everybody Wants Some!! is a spiritual sequel to the stoner teen comedy. It has a similar paper-thin plot, where all the characters are just moving around from event to event over a series of days before settling into what their future will be. Set in 1980, only a few years after Dazed, it’s often referred to as a “teen comedy.” Which I understand, impulsively… but is wildly inaccurate since it’s actually a college flick in the same vein as Animal House. Just because you can include eighteen and nineteen year olds within the “teenage” demographic, doesn’t mean the films aimed at them are actually teen films. It’s most certainly a different wavelength.

Now, something I find endlessly fascinating about Everybody Wants Some!! is how each party or bar that the team goes to over the weekend brings them into a different subculture. The group gets thrown out the disco club, but quickly don cowboy hats and hit up the country bar. They bemoan having to swap locations, but they all know the words to Cotton Eyed Joe and how to fit right in. They party at a punk club and manage to fit themselves in nicely with the performing arts kids. Despite being athletes, an archetype all its own, they are chameleons.

And their ability to play to every group possible is, I would argue, because of them being baseball players specifically. Even consistently being their school’s best team, the culture of baseball has always been much more nebulous and not super strict in its cultural rigor. Not to say that there isn’t a type of hyper masculinity within the sport, which is actively on display in Everybody Wants Some!!, but it’s a much more low-key sport in an educational context. Unlike football, or even basketball, it has almost never been considered weird or out of place for baseball playing students to have interests or a life outside of their athleticism. Why that is, I cannot say, but it’s something I’ve observed in my own life and in media - so there’s certainly something there.

But beyond the conversation about how baseball players are chameleons in their social lives, or have the potential to be, the other thing that’s interesting about the club and party hopping is that it ends up being Linklater’s love letter to the time when all these different types of subcultures could exist in a perfect state, easily visitable - even in Texas.

And, okay, I’m writing about Everybody Wants Some!! because baseball season is finally starting, after some very intense will-they-won’t-they wheeling and dealing. It seemed like they wouldn’t, at least for a while there, and that we’d only be getting college ball, nothing professional, for this upcoming season. But that isn’t the case. Thank God. And I’ve talked about my absolute favorite piece of baseball media already, when I wrote a retrospective about Pitch for its five year anniversary. However, Everybody Wants Some!! might be my second favorite - despite Linklater really holding back the guys playing for the majority of the flick. It’s a choice that I think he makes to prove a point about how men, especially in sports, relate to each other.

And it’s something that Linklater would certainly know about, since he played college baseball in Texas around the same time as the film is set. You have a group of guys, some having just turned eighteen, who are playing for perhaps the only sports team that wins anything at their school. It doesn’t matter what they major in, they’re just there to play ball. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of friendship to speak of, just frat bro behavior. Like, these guys spend all weekend trying to get laid and one-up each other before they go to practice and finally behave like they’re a team. As Finn tells Jake whilst reading Kerouac and smoking from a classic pipe, “you get a bunch of competitors together, and you’re addicted to winning.” It seems like they can’t help this behavior, it’s built into the type of social relationships they all have with each other.

Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that before a rage-filled game of table tennis and a nonsensical game of knuckles (among other equally stupid things they all do), there’s the bet that’s seared into my very heart and soul. Glen (Tyler Hoechlin) and Nesbit (Austin Amelio) make a bet that Glen can’t cut open a baseball, mid-air with an ax. Two outta three tries for ten bucks. Which, yeah… Glen wins that bet in spectacular fashion. And they show it in slow motion because Hoechlin did it practically. Hoechlin, like Linklater and Ryan Guzman (who plays Roper) also played college baseball. He was aiming to play professionally, even turning down big acting opportunities, until he was injured. But now he gets to have this iconic moment immortalized on film, which feels pretty fucking cool.

So, what about the actual baseball in Everybody Wants Some!!? Well, the last act of the film, such as it can be divided that way, is dedicated to the team’s first practice before classes. There are a few moments, like the coach coming to pull Willoughby (Wyatt Russell) off the field - they later discover he was actually in his thirties and just bouncing around, smoking weed and playing baseball at different colleges. But other than that, there’s some much needed order forced onto the newer players. Glen, who’s either the captain in actuality or just in vibes, puts one of the new pitchers, Niles (Juston Street) in his place. He calls him out for being selfish all weekend, for only playing the way he wants to play, and for always running his mouth. Niles eventually cools off and the message sinks in by the end of practice.

Ultimately, what Everybody Wants Some!! does, with basically vibes only, is say that whatever bullshit college is happening, it’s all about the sport. And maybe they haven’t figured the balance out quite yet between baseball and life. Maybe they can’t stop talking about baseball when they’re trying to get girls, and girls when they’re trying to play ball. But no matter what their differences are, they’re a family bound together by the sport. They don’t have to always like each other… they just have to play ball.