Review of The Heart of the Game (2005) by Caty I — 15 Jun 2006

Bill Resler is a middle-aged college tax professor who applies for the job of head girl's basketball coach at Seattle's Roosevelt High School. Despite having very little coaching experience, he gets it. This film follows him and his team through the next six seasons.

Resler decides his strategy will be to have no set offense but to run a full-court press every single minute of every game. To do this, his girls have to be in great physical shape so they spend a great deal of their practice time running conditioning drills. Seeing them running suicides brought back fond memories for me, even if though I hated running suicides when I actually had to run them. If you don't know what suicides are, they involve running back and forth touching the lines on the floor with your hand, and they're immensely easier for stubby-legged guards than for lanky centers. Ditto for leg lifts in which your feet must be held no more than six inches off the floor. Just imagine how easy this would be if your legs were only six inches long and then extrapolate. I tried to explain this concept to a coach once but coaches are notoriously bad at geometry.

But I digress.

In addition to all of the conditioning, Resler also wants to teach his players to play more physically. He thinks girls don't really like to touch each other so he devises a drill in which they pair up back to back and try to push each other across the court to the opposite sideline. It looks like a lot of fun. Rather than rebelling against all of this running and pushing, the girls are all for it. The star of the team declares that it's just what they need to get back on track after suffering through several seasons of mediocrity.

Resler decides that the team needs a theme and he settles on "pack of wolves". Keeping with the theme, they're supposed to stare into the eyes of their opponents, kill them, and then rip apart their bloody carcasses, figuratively of course. When they come out of team huddles they all yell, "Kill!". Other times Resler yells, "Sink your teeth into their necks" and they respond in unison, "Draw blood!". On the sidelines during games, Resler is constantly yelling "Look into their eyes!". Resler's kind of nuts but the girls buy into it. He's got them screaming and pounding on the lockers with their fists and howling like wolves. It's great.

The team ends up having an incredible season, going undefeated for quite a while and eventually making it to the state playoffs, after which Resler's star player graduates and goes on to college. Apparently the documentary was supposed to end here, but the next year, an extremely talented freshman named Darnellia Russell shows up so the filmmaker decides to stick with it.

Darnellia is one of the few black kids in a mostly white school. She's from a poor neighborhood across town whereas most of the other kids are fairly well off. Darnellia struggles both socially and academically while trying to adjust but she's got game from the get-go. We watch her evolution both as a person and a player over the course of her high school career, which includes a huge personal stumbling block. We also chart the progress of the team, which continues its winning ways but always struggles in the post-season.

There's tons of basketball footage in this movie. You figure that over the course of six seasons, a team is going to have its share of nail-biters, and I think we must see the ends of them all. We also see extended highlights of a very tight playoff game that was broadcast on TV. I'm not sure how much you'd like this movie if you don't like basketball, but if you do, you're probably going to love it.

At one point, Resler invites a 96-year-old woman who coached girl's basketball in the 1920s to come to practice and speak to his team. She's a riot. She says that at first she knew almost nothing about the game but was told to just go out and buy a whistle and a rulebook and so she did. She explains that initially the court was divided into three zones and girls were only allowed to stay in their own zone and weren't allowed to dribble more than three times in a row. The purpose of these rules were to prevent girls from over-exerting themselves. This sequence is followed by some ancient clips of women playing this strange form of basketball while dressed in long skirts. These clips alone are worth the price of admission.

In case you can't tell, I loved this movie. I toyed with the idea of giving it a 9 but I'm thinking that maybe it cheats a bit in its overreliance on game clips. It still makes for a very entertaining film, assuming you like basketball, but I'm not sure it's any more so than a triple-overtime thriller on ESPN Classic would be. I liked the actual movie part of the movie too, but it could've been a lot more in-depth in its treatment of Darnellia, who's got a ton of stuff going on in her life but is never even interviewed.

Since I never know how to end these things, I'll close with a little anecdote from my own short-lived girl's hoops coaching career. Ready?

One of my friends was coaching the varsity team at a Catholic elementary school and asked if I wanted to coach the 6th graders. I jumped at the opportunity. My kids had boundless energy and always did whatever I asked them to. It was great.

Our games were typically low-scoring affairs, like 12-8, but in one particular game, the score was just 2-0 (our lead) very late in the game. I forget the exact scenario, but one of the kids on the other team started shooting at my team's basket. My star player got the rebound, turned, and dribbled the length of the court to the other (wrong) basket. She was fortunate enough to miss the layup but proceeded to get her own rebound several times. All the while I was yelling "Time out!" at the top of my lungs but was drowned out by the roar of the parents yelling whatever it is that parents yell to their kids at these things. Eventually there was a stoppage in play and I got my time out and I pointed my kids to the proper basket and we all had a good laugh and went on to win 4-0, a rare basketball shut-out!

There's no real point to this story; I just like to tell it. As I said several paragraphs back where I probably should've ended this in the first place, if you like basketball, I think you'll love this movie. It's the best thing I've seen in months.