Call of the wild

Documentary film looks at unusual coach and a motivated team | John Dawson

There's a poignant moment in Ward Serrill's documentary about a high-school girls' basketball team, The Heart of the Game, when 96-year-old Maude Lepley visits the girls' locker room at Seattle's Roosevelt High. While images of girls of her day playing ball in long dresses, white blouses, and polished black shoes flash onscreen, Lepley explains that rules once kept the female players separated into zones. The restrictions, she said, were to keep girls from "overexercising."

In 1998 when University of Washington tax professor Bill Resler accepts a position moonlighting as the girls' basketball coach at Roosevelt, he opens practice by running his team, the Roughriders, into the ground. And they love it. In the film, rated PG-13 for brief coarse language, the girls sweat, grunt, lift weights, and practice taking charges.