The scene looks like the boot camp episode that figures in countless war movies. In the dead quiet of night, young men are rudely roused from their sleep. Ordered to run their hearts out, they slip-slide across treacherous terrain, willing themselves not to collapse since they know that anyone who doesn't make it will be washed out. But this is a movie about the making of high school football players, not soldiers--more precisely, it's a film based on a true story of the making of an integrated football team amid the racial fire storm of Alexandria, Virginia, summer 1971, on the eve of the court-mandated desegregation of T.C. Williams High School.
