While I find Sundance Festival stuff depressing and unfortunate most of the time, the humorous The Winning Season retreads many of the normal sports cliches on its way to a heartwarming tale about girls' basketball and the coach who needs the players as much (if not more) than he needs them. A blend of The Bad News Bears and A League of Their Own, the film proves that coaching boys and girls isn't the same, and having children and raising them right isn't either.

Bill (Sam Rockwell) is a down-on-his-luck busboy when we meet him but he's offered a job coaching girls' varsity basketball by a friend, and he reluctantly accepts. Having successfully coached boys in the past, Bill thinks he can go about things the way that he always has, cussing, yelling, and cajoling the girls to despondency. They're the normal blend of stereotypes (token minorities of race, sexual orientation, and skill) and they don't take too kindly to his style in their entirety (Emma Roberts, Rooney Mara, Shareeka Epps headline the players).

While Bill teaches the girls about playing together and what it means to respect themselves (after they teach him about respecting them), the girls are working on how he perceives his role as a father of a teenager. Divorced, he completely butchers his relationship with his ex-wife and his daughter, and he definitely needs them to make him a better man. He's completely out of his league in life, not just in relating to people, and it takes a community of "daughters" to make him a better person for the long haul.

The girls face the standard situations, like racism, sexuality, dating relationships, etc. and those things are serious. But the movie is shot in intimate frames, and the comedic relief is well-timed and sharp at times. Rockwell doesn't fit here, but he's not supposed to. It's a movie that doesn't seem destined for success, but it has enough good moments to make us go, "Well, that wasn't that bad" when so many things try to avoid the cliches, fall into them, and don't really provide anything for us in the end. Rockwell gets joined by the bus driver/assistant coach who provides her own fair share of comedic relief and wisdom, and does countercultural things like buying dinner for the team when they forfeit in defense of a teammate... because Bill can't afford it.

Rockwell fans and girls' basketball fans will probably buy this one (or at least rent it) but it's more about life than Xs and Os. Sure, they start winning and everything, but the individuals who rise to The Winning Season are the ones who grow to see the bigger pictures in life, to see each other more important than themselves, who embrace their individuality, and who balance it all within the context of their community. That's "kingdom" stuff, as in the kingdom of God, and however cliched this movie might be, it beats watching another sad sack movie that ends terribly. I'd rather walk away with my hand in the air having sunk the three pointer than lounging on the bench wondering if I should've shot or not.

(See, I did learn something).