I had a chance to speak with Coach Dru Joyce of St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio. The SVSM basketball team that featured LeBron James (and others) was the focus of the film More Than a Game.

Manson: Tell me a bit of how Kristopher Belman came to make the film. Did you worry it would be a distraction?

Joyce: Honestly, at that point it could have been a distraction, and we were very conscious of media distractions. We had actually closed all of our practices to the media. We had closed it to family. We really just were trying to circle the wagons, if you will, so I could try to keep the guys focused on basketball and not be distracted from some other things that were going on outside. We had opened ourselves up to a couple of media outlets. One in particular took . . . you know how it is. If you want to find something negative you can always find it. It seemed that that's what this guy wanted to do. So we were a little taken aback by that because at that point we weren't really used to that kind of stuff. All those things kind of led us to the decision that, "You know what? Hey, let's close this down; let's stay focused on what we're doing."

But Patty Burdon, a public relations person for the school, brought Kris to me and she said "Coach Dru, this is Kristopher Belman. He's from Akron. He's going to school in L.A. at Loyola Marymount, and he wants to do a ten minute school project around the team." And it seemed very innocent. I didn't think he had any ulterior motive. So because he was a student, he was from Akron, and, as I said, he didn't seem to have any ulterior motive, we allowed him to come in for what we thought would be a couple days of taping, then maybe he'd do a game, and that would be it. A few days led to a few weeks and then a couple months. Honestly, he really didn't say anything about making a full movie about this until after the season was over and after everything that happened happened. He came to me and said, "Coach Dru, I really enjoyed being around. I think I can make this into a full length documentary." I was just kind of astounded. "Are you serious?" He said, "Yeah. There's a great story here." And he went about working to get that done.

The film focuses on the "Fab Five." Tell me about the other players on the team. How do they fit into the story?

Joyce: The film really is about the friendship of the five guys, and then me, their coach, and there are basically six back stories, one for each of us. If Kris has taken any kind of heat for how he put the movie together—people have said, "Why didn't you interview some of the other guys to kind of show how they fit in?" Honestly, there was just a unique relationship with those five seniors that didn't transcend in a sense the rest of the team. They didn't feel they were above the rest of the team. But there was just a relationship with these guys that he focused on. The other guys didn't really fit into the story, except for Cory Jones, who's mentioned because he was the guy who I started in place of Willie McGee because it was definitely the right thing to do for the team to succeed and Willie became a reserve and came off the bench and had good success in that role for us. He's probably the only other guy mentioned. That year we probably went eight deep off the bench, so the other guys were very good players in their own right. In fact, that core group of guys who were freshmen, when they became seniors in 2006, we went back to the state final four. We lost in the semi-finals, but that group definitely—those freshmen who were on the team that year—there were actually five freshmen who dressed varsity, one played, Marcus Johnson. Those five did lead us back to the final four in 2006.

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