The spirit of Hoosier Hysteria shines brightly here

Rating: 10/10 (2 March 2019)

The much-acclaimed movie about a fictional Indiana high-school basketball team that wins the state championship is set two years before the famous, real-life Milan Miracle that saw a tiny high school actually win the Indiana state title-when all 751 schools in the state competed for one state championship, not four or more-is a wonderful drama, with a few comedic quips and scenes that has touched the hearts of millions of fans, many of whom don't really like basketball, or sports in general.
The film accurately gets into the heart and soul of how so many of the people in small towns in America, and most particularly in Indiana, really care about how well their high school basketball team fares each year. In other parts of the country, it is football that dominates.
We see the new coach, Norman Dale, arriving to begin his new job of teacher/coach just two weeks before basketball seasons starts and encounter all sorts of hostility from people who make wrong assumptions about him, or who don't want a coach who changes the way things have been. He struggles to even get enough players to suit up, deals with the best player in town not wanting to play at all-for reasons that have nothing to do with him-and even has to endure a town meeting where he is almost voted out of a job halfway through the season.
Slowly he builds character in the team, gets them to understand the teamwork it takes to ultimately succeed, and they make a run to the championship game in Indianapolis. There are many basketball scenes which is a joy to this viewer because I've seen too many "sports" movies where we spend, say, 100 minutes watching the movie and don't see more than 6 or so minutes of action on the playing field, as the film spends almost all of its time on personal relationships by either coach or players, frequently the "love story" the filmmakers always insist on including to draw in more viewers. However good the "romantic" story may be, I feel gypped if the movie delivers very little of the topic it is billed as.
Dale even converts a hostile teacher who misjudged him in the beginning, even though she found out about his past record of hitting a player on his team and getting banned from coaching in college basketball. He takes time to help out the father of one of his players, a struggling alcoholic, by making him an assistant coach and then putting him in a position where this assistant had to take over the team and plot a game-winning play. The coach does much for all the players, even the short guy who was just the team manager who suited up for practice so they'd have more than six bodies on the court.
I've read some of the reviews on IMDB and am astonished to read people writing that they didn't care for it because the ending (the team winning) was predictable. At any murder mystery movie, where there are, say 6 or more suspects, you can find many dozens of viewers who honestly DO predict who the killer is early on. With millions watching, every character who is a possible murderer is going to be predicted by some of the viewers. Here we have a basketball game, where there are two possible endings for the team in question-a win or a loss. I know people two years earlier made similar "predictable" complaints about the film "The Natural," even though the novel had it end the opposite way the film ended.
It isn't possible to make a film about a sports team without a sizeable percent of the audience saying the ending was predicted by them long before it was over. When this film was released, there were surely a few million of the many viewers who early on thought, "I'll bet they're going to surprise most of the watchers by having the team only come close to winning, but lose at the end." End the film differently and THEY would be the ones telling us it was "predictable."
More surprising are the people complaining about this film not being very good because it had too many scenes depicting basketball games. I guess they would hate a movie about Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley's lives because "there was too much singing."
One reviewer was disappointed they didn't reveal at the end what happened to all the players, and the coach, after that year. Perhaps that person doesn't understand the definition of FICTIONAL!
What I loved about this film is the way the got the atmosphere of small-town basketball, at least in Indiana, correct. At an hour and 54 minutes, they couldn't do too much to develop characters more without taking out most of the basketball action. Sure they could have done a few things better-what movie couldn't?
The two biggest changes I would have made would have been to skip the one romantic scene that wasn't important to the story, and not had all the gyms depicted have a vertical U.S. flag hanging backwards, with the stars on the top right for people to see. I have seen some arenas that do hang them incorrectly, but I believe everyone shown in this film was hanging wrong.
But as made, it's surely one of the best sports movies ever made. It's better than most of the baseball dramas-which I say even though baseball is my game and basketball not even close.