7/9/2006


A Winner on the Rebound

Darnellia Russell, the Focus of 'The Heart of the Game,' Knows How to Play Catch-Up

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer


There are girls out there in ponytails and basketball uniforms who dream their own hoop dreams, bouncing balls on blacktops, stepping on the night's black air for layups, being chosen over the boys for pickup games.

Swish. They're throwing balls through steel hoops, shooting for the WNBA. Basketball in hand, dreaming their own kind of fairy tales. It is a rare thing when one of those dreaming girls gets public attention.

For basketball player Darnellia Russell, the rare thing is "The Heart of the Game," a magical documentary that covers seven years of Roosevelt High School girls' basketball in Seattle and its unconventional coach, Bill Resler. At the center of the film, though, is Russell's own dramatic personal story. One critic called the documentary, which is narrated by Chris "Ludacris" Bridges and opens in Washington tomorrow, a potential "sleeper hit."

The story is an emotional journey of one team, captured by Ward Serrill, a certified public accountant turned filmmaker. With a DVD camera and no real funding, he followed the Roosevelt Roughriders for several seasons, waiting for a story to emerge.

Then one day, Darnellia Russell walked onto the court.

Serrill, who along with Russell and Resler were in Washington for a screening of the film, remembers that day, and saying to himself behind his lens: "I've been waiting for you." >

The three, Serrill, Resler and Russell, were traveling the country to promote the documentary, and last week attended the documentary's area premiere at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring. They say they are still amazed at the reaction to the film.

It's a work that carries parts of each of them. There is the filmmaker, who set out to spend a season with a basketball coach and ended up staying seven years.

There is the coach, a full-time tax professor who started coaching because one of his three daughters wanted to play basketball. He developed a coaching philosophy based on his belief that girls could play as hard as boys and that teenagers had to be given respect and room to grow.

"Pretend you are a pack of wolves," he would tell his team. "Devour your opponent. Find the weakness and kill them. Think, 'Anybody I'm guarding dies.' " With each new season came a new metaphor. A pack of wolves. A tropical storm. A pride of lions.

And there is Russell, who is 22 now, and whose transformation from a cocky, scared kid into a young woman is what helps give the film its ultimate power.

"I saw it for the first time [in full] at the Seattle Film Festival," Russell says. "First, I thought, 'Oh, my God, look at me.' It was kind of shocking to see everything he captured. I had forgotten so much."

"Heart of the Game" turns on her rise and fall and rebound. We first meet her as a 14-year-old African American freshman whose mother has made her leave her friends and her neighborhood to go across town to attend majority-white Roosevelt High.

She's wary of it all, nervous about being in a new school and being surrounded, for the first time, by so many whites. But she can play basketball and she knows it.

Resler had already heard about Russell from a gym teacher who'd told him there was a ninth-grader already good enough to make the varsity team. One day, Russell appeared on the sidelines. She carried a certain power, defiance and basketball authority. "She had that demeanor," Resler recalls. "I walked up to her and said, 'I heard rumors you know how to play basketball.' " Russell looked at him and asked, "And who are you?"

They laugh at the memory now.

"I just didn't know who he was," she explains. "Who was this man coming down? I would do that to anybody.

"That's just me. If you don't like it, I don't care. That's how my mom is. I'm not going to cry if you don't like me. Just deal with it. After a while, it can be too stressful if you are worried about people all the time."

She'd been playing basketball since she was 2 in Louisiana, where she was born, she says. She moved to Seattle at 9. "I used to be the only girl down there playing with the boys. In summer, I would be the only girl at the park playing with guys. They would pick me over the guys."

Resler, who described himself as a rule-breaker, decided the team would have no offense, but would run a full-court press -- the whole game, which required demanding physical energy and fitness from his players. They won their first game by 68 points.

He told the girls to be aggressive on the court and to believe in themselves and that the team is the inner circle and that adults should stay out of that inner circle.

"I have 14-, 15- and 16-year-old girls trying to get older," Resler says from his space on the couch. "I'm more worried about life lessons than whether we win a game."

He taught repeatedly: "You should never be judged by your mistakes. To err is human, to forgive is mandatory."

His team rose to become a dynasty, and Russell was its star. They got loads of media attention, and Russell was flooded with letters of interest from universities. Her plan was to be the first person in her family to go to college.

Then her life took a turn.

At the end of her junior season, Russell quit school "inexplicably," and her demeanor changed at home.

April Swafford, Russell's mother, who is traveling with her, says she had her suspicions. I asked her, 'Are you pregnant? Because you act like somebody pregnant.' "

Her daughter said no. But her mother didn't buy it. She bought a pregnancy test, and stood in the bathroom with her daughter as she took it. Two blue lines appeared.

"I was devastated," Swafford says. "She had so much going for her. I was thinking it was the worst thing that could happen. She was 18. I was 14 when I had my first child. She reminds me so much of me."

"I was just tripping out," Russell recalls of that moment in her life. "I messed up. I thought going to college was gone."

The story could have ended there, but it just got more intense. And what Russell and the team and her coach went through is the kind of riveting sports drama that you'd never believe if you didn't know it was true. And Serrill was there to capture it all.

Serrill said the idea for the film came at a party in Seattle, where he met Resler. "There was this character who started telling me stories about a girls' basketball team. And 45 minutes later, he was still telling the story."

Serrill did what was only natural for a filmmaker: He followed him into the gym to see what the coach was talking about. He was intrigued by the passion he saw in Resler's team. "I naively said I was going to make a movie about this," he says. "I didn't have a story or a plot that first year, but I didn't know that. You never know with documentaries. It is like following a wild animal into the woods."

Serrill, whose experience was making short films for nonprofit groups, had never made a full-length documentary. His plan was to make the coach the main character. "He had this ability to get the girls to work . . . and laugh. There was so much laughter in practice and in the locker rooms. The girls had developed so much self-esteem and self-confidence. He was encouraging the girls and allowing them to express their spirits. For many of those girls, it was the first time they had been allowed to do that."

Serrill says audiences always laugh at a line in the movie that shows Resler's understanding about being a teenager: "You tell a teenager to go do ABC. They look at you and say, 'Yes, I'll do ABC.' And five seconds later, they do XYZ, and you'll ask them, 'Why did you do XYZ?' and they will look at you like, 'Why did you ask that question?' "

Hampered by the lack of funding, Serrill worked a full-time job while making the film. It meant he could only dart in and out of games. He couldn't delve into the lives of his characters. "In 'Hoop Dreams,' the film crew was with the families 24/7. I didn't have that luxury," Serrill said, noting the Oscar-nominated 1994 documentary. "My idea was the team would become the character. That was a naive idea. By the time I figured Darnellia was the main character, those early years had gone by."

For two years of filming, Russell would not talk to him, Serrill says.

"I'd come up and ask her something or say something. She would just turn and walk away. She was not very open to strangers, particularly older white guys just coming up and asking her questions."

After the film is over, Darnellia Russell leaves her seat in the audience and takes the stage, sitting next to the coach, who sits next to the filmmaker and prepares to take the audience's questions. Her hair is straight and bends slightly at the neck. She still looks like a teenager.

She has no idea how magical her story is and that it seems to have transcended race, generations and gender. Later she will receive a standing ovation, and women in the audience will cheer her perseverance, men will applaud her victories and little girls will crowd around her to ask for her autograph.

Her own little girl, now 3, is in Washington state with her dad while Russell completes this tour. They are still a couple, she says, continuing to rear their daughter with their families' support. "She says she wants to play basketball, but she likes to dance, so she wants to be a cheerleader," Russell says. "She can be what she wants to be."

Russell says she has two more quarters at North Seattle Community College, where she is on the team and was named player of the year her first season. She would like to go on to play at a university, she says.

"I got the player of the year for the second season, too. And the all-star game," she says. She still dreams of going to the WNBA.

A man walks to an open mike and says: "It's incredible to me you weren't offered a scholarship."

"I don't know why," Russell replies.

"I don't want to say too much," Resler says, "but it is sexism. If a boy makes a mistake he still gets to play."

Russell begins to explain: "It was really hard at times. I would sit in my room and cry." She tries not to cry onstage. She pauses, holding back tears. "But I think, with the support of my family, even if I didn't get a scholarship, I could keep going."

The crowd applauds her words.

Her mother stands in a corner of the theater as people begin to leave. She has seen the movie more than 10 times. The mother always cries at the same place: when Resler asks how an 18-year-old girl is supposed to take care of school, play basketball and be a mother.

She watches Russell now, signing autographs. Her daughter, she says, has no idea why the movie has such sway over audiences. "She says she felt like, 'I did what I had to do.' I said, 'You don't see the inspiration?' "

She hopes maybe her daughter will get a college scholarship to play and eventually end up in the WNBA.

She tells her often: "Hold on to your dreams because once you let someone take your dream, they are basically taking your life."