Inspiring true story of a coach who gets Mexican immigrant sons to run cross country.

Rating: Null/10 (28 June 2015)

This is definitely not a "republican" movie, where the focus is more often "how can we keep Mexicans out of the USA?" This is about Mexican immigrant families working hard in the fields of California, harvesting the current crop, be it tomatoes or oranges or cabbage. They get paid by the field so long hours and picking efficiency has its reward. It is a job for all male family members with little time for fun.
But Kevin Costner as Jim White has just been fired from a coaching job because he became angry at a player's attitude and threw a shoe at him, cutting the boy's face, in the locker room at halftime. So as a last resort, to support his family of wife and two daughters, he lands in Mcfarland, California, a heavily Mexican community in the center of the state north of Los Angeles, in 1987. He assists with football, but the team is poor. However he notices that many of the boys seemingly can run forever. As one explains, he doesn't have a car so he needs to get places.
Somewhere in all this coach White gets permission to start a cross country team. No one at the school even knew what all cross country entailed. None of the boys went into it eagerly. But gradually they managed to form a team with the mandatory 7 boys.
Costner is really good and the script is very interesting. The DVD has an extra which includes shots of the original boys, now in their 40s, running with the boys in the cast. Apparently former cross country members routinely return to visit and run with the boys in training just for the team-building factor. It is a matter of record that Mcfarland won 9 state cross country championships over a 14- year period starting in 1987.
Good movie, shows how one person can make a lasting difference through perseverance, even if coach White's initial ambition was just to find a job away from Mcfarland. His attitude changed and he remained there.