6 Sports Movie Coaches You Definitely Do Not Want to Play For

Sports movies typically have a few common through-lines to them that help make them the universally enjoyable flicks that they are. For some reason, knowing and even looking for a few story beats common to these movies doesn’t take away from their ability to entertain and inspire. Even though we know what’s going to happen we still get chills at the big comeback or the critical locker room speech.

There are multiple coach tropes throughout the history of sports movies. The washed-up former athlete overcoming his demons, the reluctant coach who doesn’t want to be there, the inept coach, the evil coach of either the main character’s team or their archrivals. For the most part, these are guys you do not want to play for until they make their big turnaround at the end of the second act, if at all.

Phil Brickma – Rookie of the Year

Unlike most of the entries on this list, Phil Brickma isn’t a bad person or an antagonist in the film. The only real issue with Brickma is that instead of actual coaching he tends to just rattle off some hyperactive nonsense. Introducing newest Chicago Cubs player 12-year-old Henry Rowengartner to the team, manager Sal Martinella tells Henry “That’s Phil Brickma, pitching coach. I beaned him in the minor leagues and he’s been following me around ever since.” It’s left unsaid but obvious that Martinella hitting Brickma in the head is what caused him to be this way. Out of an enduring sense of pity Martinella, and presumably the Cubs organization as a whole, has kept Brickma on despite his ongoing uselessness.

Through the course of the movie we see Brickma nearly choke on chewing tobacco; fling a tray full of items onto his neighboring passengers while showing Henry the most important thing for a ballplayer “the conservation of resources,” in this case, airplane food; get stuck between the two doors of adjoining hotel rooms; hit himself in the head with a batted ball three times in three swings; and get stuck in the equipment locker during the climactic game.

And let’s not forget “the three R’s”: Readiness, Recuperation and Conditioning.

Jackie Moon – Semi-Pro

As a basketball franchise, the American Basketball Association’s Flint Tropics had a lot of problems. At the start of the 1976 ABA season the league announced that it was merging with the NBA, with only the league’s four best teams going along for the ride while the others would be dissolved. The struggling Tropics were the league’s worst team, they drew nearly no fans and were owned by player-coach Jackie Moon, a broke former one-hit wonder purchased the team at his peak, making his song “Love Me Sexy” the team’s unofficial anthem. As Jackie himself puts it, his qualification as a player is “I saw it on T.V. a couple of times and thought, ‘I could do that.'”

Following the announcement, Jackie becomes desperate to make the Tropics successful. He brings in aging backup point guard Ed Monix in a trade for the Tropics washing machine, eventually yielding the coaching reins to Monix who actually knows what he’s doing. Jackie continues to lead the team however and, after the commissioner decrees that the Tropics will also have to draw at least 2,000 fans per-game the rest of the season, goes on a quest to increase attendance with a series of increasingly non-basketball stunts.

It’s generally a bad sign for your team’s prospects when the owner has to habitually duck Dukes, a local stoner and “especially dirty hippie”, to avoid paying out the $10,000 prize for hitting a halftime show contest shot from the opposite free-throw line. In addition to his fake basketball stunts, Jackie takes the team’s valuable practice time to rehearse a costumed musical; performs a roller skate jump that takes him down a ramp and over all but one of the team’s cheerleaders; and plays defense against his own team to prevent them from scoring 125 points at the end of a game on “Free Corn Dog Night.” You can guess what happens.

By far the most irresponsible thing Jackie does through the course of the movie is his stunt with Dewey. This promotional event ends up endangering not only the business but the actual lives of his players and fans. If you don’t remember which character Dewey is, he was the live grizzly bear that Jackie decides to wrestle before immediately regretting the move and letting the bear escape his cage.

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Artie DeVanzo – Beer League

In the first of our two Ralph Macchio entries (spoiler), comic Artie DeVanzo is player-coach of his local beer league softball team in a barely-a-character role played by comic Artie Lange. If you don’t recognize the name, the face might do it, Lange is the guy who loves cocaine so much his nose melted.

I’m officially 10 months clean as of today. I can’t thank you all enough for the love and support. pic.twitter.com/50gh1PdqBP

— Artie Lange (@artiequitter) November 30, 2019

The Artie in the film is basically the same guy. The movie opens with Artie doing a not unfunny ripoff of Bill Murray’s classic Caddyshack scene where he improvises commentary while hitting flowers with a garden tool, with Artie hitting softballs into his garage door while chain smoking as the analog. We see him get into a fight with and curse out a local teenager in the first 15 seconds of the movie, properly setting the stage for who this guy is.

Before the team’s first game, Artie tells teammates “anyone who doesn’t do a shot with me is a fucking pussy” before downing a shot of whiskey and picking a fight with the other team’s best player, his arch rival Manganelli. During the game Artie gets so caught up in his feud that he forgets to even run to first base after a hit and commits multiple errors in the field, including missing a play while taking a smoke break on the field, leading an elderly teammate to declare “you disappoint me as much as my kids.” The game ends when Artie trips Manganelli as he runs the bases, triggering a bench clearing brawl that lands both sides in jail.

In addition to being a bad coach, Artie is a bad friend, encouraging his buddy Mazz, Ralph Macchio, to break up with his fiancee throughout the movie, and constantly leading his pals into drunken trouble. As tends to happen in these movies, the world eventually conspires against the league and the worst team is going to be contracted at the end of the season, setting stakes for success. Artie decides that if the team actually tries to practice and play hard, instead of drinking and smoking their way through games, they might have a shot.

The team goes to work, trying to improve a defense that “hasn’t turned a double play in three years” through the power of a montage. With Lange drinking and providing commentary, we see them go from terrible to capable in 90 seconds, before the inevitable winning streak that vaults them into the title game. Artie throws a bachelor party, breaks his rule about not doing cocaine anymore and gets into his third fight of the movie, this time with the his friend Mazz’s father in law to be. Through a series of additional machinations, Artie also ends up missing the wedding entirely when the prostitute he hires to go with him… you know what, I think we know he’s a colorful guy by now, just watch the movie.

By the end, the team’s oldest player has died inspiring the team not to victory but to hit the booze hard two hours before the championship game. They show up to the game completely hammered and end up losing a game that gets better as they sober up. In “the greatest asshole move ever” Artie ends up stealing the trophy and running off with it.

In an unrelated story, several years before this movie was released, a member of my Hoboken, NJ bar league darts team pulled that exact same move after we lost the title to a far superior team who didn’t find it nearly as amusing as we did. This is both a movie that is more amusing than it gets credit for and a pretty on-point look at North Jersey.

All the Opposing Coaches in the Mighty Ducks Movies

Coaches in kids movies are way over the top. Provided you don’t compare them to some real-life coaches that is.

The evil kid’s team coach with way too much money, time and dedication on his hands trope is possibly no more apparent than in the Mighty Ducks franchise. In the first installment, hot shot lawyer Gordon Bombay is arrested for drunk driving and sentenced to coaching a local youth hockey team. Holy shit, wait a minute, in what universe is putting someone in a position of responsibility supervising children an appropriate punishment for doing one of the most irresponsible things a person can do? Did the judge in his case go to law school in a bad sitcom written by George Costanza in which we have service jobs instead of prisons?

Throughout the movie Bombay bonds with the scrappy team of untalented kids, first telling them their best bet is to fake injuries and start fights, but later helping them get proper equipment and learn the skills that would help them ride the back of the ringer players Bombay uses to fill out the roster. One of these ringers is stolen from the Hawks, the “good” local team, against his will, via a zoning technicality. Another kid interests Bombay for his powerful slapshot and tough guy nature, though the coach doesn’t pay much attention to the fact that his player is possibly homeless. And this is the good guy coach.

The coach of the 1992 Hawks, Jack Reilly, has been in the role since at least 1973, when Gordon Bombay was his star player. Unable to ever forgive Bombay for missing a crucial penalty shot and costing him the one title he didn’t win in his tenure as coach, Reilly holds a lifelong grudge. Whether the his advice prior to the shot “If you miss this you’re not only letting me down, you’re letting your whole team down,” had any impact on Bombay’s shot doesn’t seem to cross the allegedly great coach’s mind. In the first meeting between the two youth teams he has the Hawks run up the score to humiliate Bombay and his Ducks, because revenge is a dish best served to teenagers who have nothing to do with your grudge. He later orders a player to injure the Ducks star player, and their former teammate.

Somehow, Reilly is only the second worst coach in this franchise. That honor goes to in-universe former NHL player Wolf “The Dentist (who needed a nickname cooler than Wolf)” Stansson. The Dentist is the head coach of Iceland’s youth hockey program for the Goodwill Games, in yet another baffling coaching assignment. This was a guy who was kicked out of the NHL for his reputation for violence and bad behavior. During the movie we see Stansson order his team to injure other players and we’re treated to his scumbaggery first-hand when he confronts the Ducks on ice, literally pops the ball they’re playing with, then deliberately attacks the injured knee that forced Bombay to give up his NHL dreams between movies.

John Kreese – The Karate Kid

You just get the feeling that John Kreese is bringing some baggage into his role as the sensei of the Cobra Kai dojo in the Karate Kid franchise. Throughout the series he is inexplicably dedicated to the defeat and destruction of a local teenager and his karate teacher/maintenance man/best friend. I’m not a parent, but I did briefly take karate lessons as a kid, so let me give the parents out there an expert tip: when evaluating karate schools for your children, if the motto is “Strike first. Strike hard. No mercy” the instructor might have his own stuff going on. Take from that what you will, I mean, there’s no denying the guy is an objectively effective karate teacher.

Kreese’s issues could easily come from his service in Vietnam which is mentioned in the first film and delved into in later installments. He doesn’t seem like the type to spend much time distinguishing between someone of Vietnamese descent and someone from Okinawa, displaying nothing but contempt for Pat Morita’s Mr. Miyagi from the outset.

Kreese’s actions in the familiar original installment – namely ordering his students to injure opponents during matches and encouraging them to bully and beat the protagonist – are nothing when compared to what he does in the third movie and subsequent streaming series Cobra Kai. This is a man who fakes his own death to get revenge on a local karate enthusiast and his single mother. Multiple times. This is a man paid by people to supervise and mold their children, who reacts to their defeat like this:

First he attacks Daniel, the protagonist, and attempts to choke him to death, then punches his way through car windows while trying to hit Daniel’s teacher, Mr. Miyagi. Through various shady dealings with local business tycoons who are surprisingly willing to go along with his schemes for karate-themed revenge over the course of thirty years, Kreese eventually regains control of the Cobra Kai dojo in 2019’s Cobra Kai season 2, so it’s anyone’s guess what he has planned from here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRH0gd0Ogdw

Coach Kilmer – Varsity Blues

I think we all knew this one was coming. There’s just no coach more evil than Bud Kilmer, the leader of the West Caanan, TX Coyotes. By the time we meet him, Kilmer has been the coach of the high school’s team for 30 years, during which he “brought two state titles and 22 district championships” which on the Friday Night Lights scale of how frequently teams win Texas state titles is actually a terrible track record.

The damage this lunatic coach has done to generations of Texans is shown throughout the movie through both the current players and their fathers. Kilmer is like a to-do list for awful coaches. From verbal abuse to forcing his athletes to play injured to racism to actively making players take pain-killing drugs to threatening to destroy his own player’s chances at college scholarships if they don’t fall in line, Kilmer is willing to go to any lengths to win another title. Any lengths beyond considering new and alternative methods and football strategies. As a football coach Kilmer makes a hell of a drill sergeant, dressing down players with verbal abuse in front of their teammates and fathers. The latter’s tacit approval with the idea that the treatment will make men of their boys demonstrating exactly how much damage Kilmer is allowed to do to the town’s mentality.

Perhaps his most egregious sin is referring to offensive lineman and elephant of a man Billy Bob as “William Robert” which absolutely no one would or should ever do to a perfectly good Texan who keeps a pig named Dog as a pet. Billy Bob suffers countless concussions for Kilmer but is eventually cleared by doctors after they “scan his cat” and find no lasting damage. They should have double checked.

During halftime of what would become Coach Kilmer’s final game his team commits mutiny in defense of their teammate who Kilmer was attempting to inject with pain killers. Kilmer responds by lashing out at the players verbally then attacking and attempting to murder his quarterback with a reverse-Sprewell move.

The team refuses to take the field for Kilmer, eventually winning the game on a trick play with injured star quarterback Lance Harbor taking the clipboard in the second-half, because this is a football movie that forgets that assistant coaches and coordinators are a thing.

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