The Movie Coach Carter is more than just a basketball film. It is about life lessons that young African Americans and athletes everywhere can learn from. The movie stars Samuel Jackson in one of his best movies ever. It is film with drama, raw emotion, and inspiration. Samuel Jackson plays the role of Mr. Carter, a man who loves basketball and sports and owns his own sports shop.
He lives in a neighborhood filled with poverty, drugs, shootings, muggings, and other criminal activity that happens on the streets everyday. Mr. Carter wants the best for his son who is high school age and beleives strongly in eduction so he sends him to a private school, in a better neighborhood than the one he lives in where he can get a better education.
The basketball team in Carter’s neighborhood high school is awful. They don’t care about team play or winning and only care about their individual performances.
When the basketball coach retires, Mr. Carter takes over the team and immediately installs a new mentality to these young men. He forces the basketball players to sign contracts in which they agree to go to their classes, receive good grades in those classes and play hard for the team. Initially this gets an outrage from the players as well as their parents who beleive strongly in hoops for their children and are concerned about Carter’s policy of making the players wear a shirt and tie to all games.
Carter beleives in teaching these athletes how to become adults and succeed in the real world, after they are done playing basketball. Realistically, none of these players have a chance of becoming professional players and ony a few will play college ball. Carter wants to give them lessons for their life. During practices he makes them work extrmely hard, running wind sprints and extra defensive drills. When one player quits the team, he has a don’t care mentality and asks if anyone else wants to leave the team as well.
He is perceived as a drill seargent and a mean guy, which is just fine with him. When the team finally starts to play hard and they actually start winning, he finds out that they havent been attending their classes nor have they been recieving good grades in them. Even his own son, who he allows to transfer to his basketball team and school, who is also an outstanding academic student sees his grade average fall.
Torn apart with emotion, Carter takes drastic action and closes the gym so that the team cannot practice or play their game. This causes furher outrage in the community who want to see the kids play basketball and dont care about their academic performance in the classroom. Even iinitially, the principal of the school doesnt care either until Carter makes her see that basketball is influential in their lives but academics come first. The clsoing of the gym causes the community to demand that he be fired or resign but the principal and Carter both refuse.
The team, agasint the anger of the comnunity decide that Coach Carter was right, they have no one to blame but themselves and they decide to study hard in the library, get tutors and pass their classes. Once they do this, Carter sees that his message has fially gotten through to his players and he reopens the gym, much ot the delight of everyone. The team resumes their winning streak and make it to the finals.
This film contains it all. A sports them for any sports fan to enjoy, drama – a former player on the team is shot and killed in the streets and Samuel Jackson comforts his friend and player on the team who witnesses the shooting. A viewer cannot help but stand up and cheer for this amazing film. I give Samuel Jackson a five star performance, truly one of his best works ever. I highly recomend this film to any movie viewer or sports fan.
