Coach Carter

Summary

It is a true-life story of a coach who tries to teach his players that there's more to life than basketball. Ken Carter was once a star player on the Richmond High School basketball team in Richmond, CA, and years later, after establishing himself in publishing and marketing, in 1999, he returns to the school and to the team as the new basketball coach. Carter quickly sees that his work is cut out for him -- the team is having an awful season, and their fights off the court are more decisive than their play on the court. While Carter wants to make the team into a winning team, he also wants a lot more -- to teach the boys to respect themselves and one another, and that they must excel in the classroom as well as in the gymnasium. He immediately imposes a strict regime typified in written contracts that include stipulations for respectful behavior, a dress code and good grades as requisites to being allowed to participate. Under Carter's guidance, the team turns their losing season around, with the state title a genuine possibility.

However, when the overconfident team’s behavior begins to stray and Carter learns that a number of his players have let their grade point averages slip below 2.3, as mandated in a contract he entered into with the students, he decides to lock the team out of the gym and send them into study hall until their marks improve. To the outrage of the team, the school and the community, Carter cancels all team activities and locks the court until the team shows acceptable academic improvement. In the ensuing debate, Carter fights to keep his methods, determined to show the boys that they need to rely on more than sports for their futures. Carter's plan quickly becomes a subject of controversy among parents and team boosters, and their objections are soon picked up by the local news media, many of whom are not sympathetic to Carter's belief that his players must have goals beyond college ball or the NBA. However, Carter eventually finds he has affected his players more profoundly then he ever expected.


Characters

1. Coach Carter

General background:

· He was once a star on the Richmond High School basketball team.
· In 1999, he accepted the duty as a coach for basketball team in Richmond High School.
· He had a son, named Damien, who was also a part of the team.

Personalities:

· Strict – As a coach, he imposed a strict regime typified in written contracts that include stipulations for respectful behavior, a dress code and good grades as requisites to being allowed to participate.

· Responsible – He carried out his responsibility as a coach very well. In order to make the team undefeated, he introduced them a lot of practices, especially the “suicide” and “push up”.

· Brave – Without the permissions of the school’s authority and community, he took the decision to cancel all team activities and locked the court until the team show acceptable academic improvement.

· Determine – Carter fought to keep his methods, determined to show the boys that they needed to rely on more than sports for their futures.

· Sympathetic – Carter sympathized on the incident happened to the family member of one of his team players, Junior, where his brother had passed away. Junior’s mother came to talk with Carter and asked him to give one more chance to her son to play in the team, Carter agreed after Junior apologized for what he had done.

2. The basketball team players

General background:

· The main characters consisted of Kenyon, Lyle, Damien, Worm, Junior and Timo Cruz.
· Lyle’s father was in prison.
· Junior’s brother had passed away.
· Cruz was involved in drugs.
· Kenyon had a girl friend, called Kyra. They were having a conflict on whether to give birth to the baby or not.
· Damien’s father was Carter. Damien transferred from St. Francis School to Richmond High school after he agreed to accept his father’s condition where he had to maintain a 3.7 average-grade point.

Personalities:

· Rude – In general, the boys were rude in behaviour. They used the words such as “nigger”, “dogs”, and “shit” when they talked to each other or even to the elder person. They did not respect to other peoples. However, under Coach Carter guidance, they learned to respect to others.

· Helpful – After an early run-in with the coach, for instance, Cruz begged to be reinstated on the team, and Carter assigned him a near-impossible calisthenics load. In a classic Spartacus turn, the others pitched in to help, taking some extra push-ups for the team. This crystal-clear gesture was unnecessarily girded with a lengthy explanatory speech about the power of teamwork.

· Overconfident – Under Carter’s guidance, they won a lot of competitions, and therefore looked on themselves as an undefeated team. But after Carter’s advice and “punishment”, they changed their point of view.

· Willing to learn – In order to get an average-grade point of 2.3 or above, they worked hard on their academic performances, and finally they succeeded to achieve the grade required.


Comments

It was an interesting movie that I have ever seen before. Ken Carter was such a great person. Carter, as a high school basketball coach, could bench his undefeated team until some of its members got their grades up. He changed them, from a group of boys who were hot-tempered and liked to fight, unrespectful and rude to a high moral attitudes’ group of men. He successfully corrected their mind although the task was a difficult one!

This movie reflected a few social issues that contributed no benefits but harmed the society. First of all, I could notice the impolite and rude attitudes among the teenagers. They behaved in bad ways, for instance, they could fight with others just because of a few words by the others that sounded uncomfortable to them. Besides, there were cases of pregnancy among the teenagers, in such young ages. In my point of view, they were still not mature enough to take care of baby in such young ages. And the guy, who was the father of the baby, still had not enough money to feed the baby. This probably led to the abortion of the baby. How cruel they were! In this case, we could see another social issue involved that was the poverty in America rankles.

Furthermore, there were teenagers that involved in drugs and gangsterism. They used the drugs in a wrong manner and it resulted in bad health in the end. Not only that, drug addiction could lead to many cases of crimes. Gangsterism was considered as illegal and dangerous. But still lots of young peoples got themselves involved in it and did something that against the law, such as murdering peoples. They could hold gun in their hands! From this incident, we could see that the law enforced was not strict enough to get rid of all these crimes.

In addition, I noticed that the education system in which I could find in Coach Carter was bad. The school’s authority seemed to be unaware of the bad results got by the basketball team players. Even if they did not attend the classes without any reason, no one was going to concern about that. The value of discipline seemed to be worthless. Because of the poor academic performances, their chances to attend colleges after the high school were very, very small. The society did not care about their academic performances at school at all; their lives were just about basketball, nothing else. How sad they were!

These were what I could get from this movie. Thanks for reading.