The Heart of the Game

First-time filmmaker Ward Serrill spent seven years following the career of Seattle high-school girls’ basketball coach Bill Resler, and there’s no getting around the fact that he simply lucked into the subject of a lifetime. It’s a terrific, dramatic story about a movie-friendly sport, with people (Resler, his players, and their family and friends) who are all intelligent, photogenic and well-spoken. But Serrill himself doesn’t drop the ball (pun intended); his digital-video camera (Serrill was his own cinematographer) produced a lot of exciting game footage (credit editor Eric Frith, too), his interviews are insightful, and his written narration, read by Ludacris, is incisive and engrossing. All in all, it’s one of the best feel-good sports documentaries to come along in years.