The Heart of the Game
Attention, teenage athletes and the families who love them: Drop your cleats and proceed directly to the Kendall Square Cinema, where the girls high school basketball documentary ``The Heart of the Game" is unspooling. Yes, guys too. Fictional Hollywood sports movies huff and puff to achieve what this modest reality film does without breaking a sweat: It's a wrenching, ennobling essay on teamwork and the hard struggle to change one's life.
When Bill Resler became head coach of the Roosevelt High Rough Riders in the late 1990s, the team was languishing in the backwaters of the Seattle school's athletic program. Within one season, it had an undefeated record and was drawing bigger crowds than the boys games; Resler, a burly, graybearded tax law professor at the University of Washington, was named coach of the year.
You quickly see why. Drawing on the personal training he had given his three daughters, Resler dismantles his offense, turns everybody into guards, and pulls the girls together in an ``inner circle" in which they rely on each other for support (nice strategy; it keeps meddling parents out of the loop). More crucially, he taps into his players' teenage aggression by recasting them as women warriors.
Each season has a different theme: One year it's ``Pack of Wolves," the next it's ``Pride of Lions." The other team is merely prey, and Resler amps up the players' killer instinct with hilarious pre-game chants. Coach: ``Put your teeth in their necks!" Girls: ``Draw blood!" Everyone understands it's a goof and entirely serious.
Director Ward Serrill spent seven years filming at Roosevelt, and there are as many on-court heartbreakers as there are moments of joy. One of the players takes on a private coach, with repercussions for her teammates and herself. Garfield High, a much rougher school across town, becomes a force to be reckoned with when Joyce Walker, a Garfield alumna and one of the first women pro basketball players, returns to her old school to coach.
Narrated by the rapper-actor Ludacris, ``The Heart of the Game" increasingly focuses on Darnellia Russell, a middle school basketball sensation who could have gone to Garfield but whose mother instead gets her into Roosevelt for the improved educational prospects. Intimidated at first -- ``I've never been around so many white people before," Darnellia mutters -- she nevertheless makes the varsity her freshman year, with Resler molding her rough skills into smooth team play. The college recruiters start to sniff around. Then catastrophe hits.
If the movie has a fault, it's one that Resler shares: So caught up are the filmmakers and the coach (and we) in Darnellia's travails that the other players start to fade into the background. In part, that's because there's a compelling story here -- one that includes bureaucratic wrangling on the part of the league's governing body, the WIAA -- and in part it's because Russell is a commanding presence: a girl who may someday, with luck and talent and self-confidence, be an astounding woman.
Resler does what he can to prompt her self-respect. It's his M.O. -- when a rift opens between Darnellia and the team's other star player, Hilary Seidel, he sends the Rough Riders to the locker room to hash it out themselves, which they handily do. ``The Heart of the Game" finds its own heart in the way the girls dig deep on the court and let it go afterward ; Darnellia and her best friend from Garfield are vicious rivals during game-time and giggly pals the second the final buzzer sounds.
In the film's climactic moments, Roosevelt finally makes it to the Washington state finals -- against Garfield, no less -- and the stage is set for triumph or one hell of a life lesson. It almost doesn't matter. Resler rewards the Rough Riders for their year long support of Darnellia in her battle with the WIAA by using all of his players, even the ones who've mostly sat on the bench. The announcers are aghast; it makes no sense.
Then we watch a hulking freshman suddenly come alive and sink basket after basket -- floating through the air in defiance of every expectation placed on her. And we understand.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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