A high-school boys' basketball team keeps losing games, resulting in the firing of their coach. The school head hires a renowned athlete called Randy Rawlings as a replacement. The only trouble is, it turns out the new coach is a woman and the sexist school head expected a man. Needless to say, the female coach mixes things up somewhat and even begins a relationship with one of her students.
Coach is another film from those arbiters of good taste, Crown International Pictures. Unlike quite a few of the films from these guys, however, this one isn't very salacious or schlocky. It has, at best, some throwaway, half-hearted nude scenes. In fact, I thought that this was one of the more thoughtful teen-oriented movies from its time. The main reason for this is that the central relationship is played out in a quite realistic and unsensational manner. It works pretty well and is pretty engaging due in no small part to the fine chemistry between leads Cathy Lee Crosby and a young Michael Biehn. Both actors both do very good work here and really go some way to elevating the material overall.
It was quite interesting to see the whole storyline about the coach having an affair with one of her students be played out in such an underplayed manner though, like this was the most normal turn of events imaginable. After all, this behaviour would nowadays generally result with a swift prison sentence! But I think most of us truthfully find it kind of difficult getting too upset when it's a hot female teacher taking a young male student under her wing – I reckon most of us guys would have been up for a bit of that when we were younger to be perfectly honest! And in any case, it's a scenario that is genuinely played out in a pretty mature manner here by the leads and is much more cute than ever salacious. By contrast, on a completely different tone, there is a silly sub-plot about a gangly boy who is unwittingly put under hypnosis in order to turn him into a superstar basketball player. This nonsense offsets the relationship stuff and ensures that this movie has at least one foot in the comedy genre. On the whole, I found this a kind of likable affair. It's predictable fluff in many ways, yet it is also well acted and has a definite fun factor to it. I say, yes.
