Would Norman Dale of 'Hoosiers' hold up as a high school coach today?

Stephen Borelli, USA TODAYSat, March 14, 2026 at 11:02 AM UTC

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You likely have done it if you’re a youth basketball coach.

You’ve told your kids they’re not going to do any shooting in practice, or that they won’t shoot in games unless they first pass four times.

You’ve played the “Hoosiers” theme music to inspire them after a loss. (Guilty as charged.)

The first time I watched the movie, I was nursing mononucleosis as a young adult, and, when Jimmy Chitwood hit the winning shot, I wanted to jump off my couch and hit the court. Coach Norman Dale’s words rattled around in my head.

Forget about the crowds. The size of the school. Their fancy uniforms. And remember what got you here. Focus on the fundamentals that we've gone over time and time again. And most important, don't get caught up thinking about winning or losing this game. If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential, to be the best that you can be, I don't care what the scoreboard says, at the end of the game, in my book, we're gonna be winners. OK!

(Clap. Clap. Clap. …)

The original release of the movie will turn 40 this fall. The lines and scenes continue to resonate through sports arenas and the American consciousness.

But what about Norman Dale?

Gene Hackman, shown in 1985, starred as basketball coach Norman Dale in "Hoosiers."

The iconic, and fictional, coach, hired by Hickory High (also fictional) in rural 1950s Indiana has a dark past that unravels slowly to viewers, like the car at the start of the movie heading from the distance.

We get a striking look at a man, played by Gene Hackman, who is given one more chance at the job he loves.

Hackman, who died at 95 last year, once said he loved acting while he was doing it, and he never got tired of it. We see those qualities in the firm Coach Dale, who starts out as a taskmaster and learns to concede to his players’ wishes when he feels they’re best for the team.

But if you walked into a high school gym today, and you saw him with a whistle, would his role hold up?

Let’s take a deeper look at Dale, and what youth and high school coaches take to heart from him.

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The humanity of the character grabs you from the moment he drives into the picture, hunched over his steering wheel with coffee, powering through the night to get to his team after the season has started.

“It feels like we’re in the Army,” one player says during a Dale practice.

“You are in the army. You’re in my army,” is Dale’s response. “Every day between 3 and 5.”

David Neidorf, who played Everett (Shooter’s son) in the movie, recalled in 2025 how he saw Hackman for the first time when the actor walked onto the floor in the movie.

The players were kids who could play basketball but were being taught how to act. The tension was real.

“Basketball is a voluntary activity,” Dale tells the boys at an early practice, “it’s not a requirement. … My practice is not designed for your enjoyment.”

“I’m only gonna say this one time,” he says, his voice rising after a disastrous first game, “all of you have the weekend to think about whether you want to be on this team or not, under the following condition: What I say, when it comes to this basketball team, is the law. Absolutely and without discussion.”

But like any good coach, he begins to make adjustments. They become empowering to his players.

“Early in the movie, he shuts down every time a player tries to bring something up in the huddle or locker room,” Jason Sacks, Chief Executive Officer of the Positive Coaching Alliance, wrote to USA TODAY Sports in an email. “As the movie progresses, he becomes much more open to hearing feedback from players regarding what they are seeing on the court and the game strategy. PCA has a resource for coaches about giving athletes voice and choice. A great way for a coach to start a halftime conversation is to ask players, ‘What are you seeing out there?’ What do you think we could be doing differently?’ "

As part of this exercise, USA TODAY Sports asked Sacks to offer observations from the perspective of the PCA that he likes (or maybe doesn’t like) about Dale.

“Another ironic scene − all the way back in the 50s − is parents (and the local residents) going to administration to remove a high school basketball coach,” Sacks writes. “Unfortunately, this is much more common these days, with more and more examples of either coaches stepping down because of parents, or parents pressuring the administration to remove a coach.”

The trust Dale’s players gain in him ultimately prevails over the parents who want to control the team.

Norman Dale is willing to sacrifice the result of a game for the greater good

Behind the tough exterior, Dale shows signs of at first being nervous about how he will do in a basketball-crazed state after many years away.

Before his first game, he takes a moment to himself in the stairway at the gym, and says: “Welcome to Indiana basketball.” He walks onto the court looking overwhelmed at the noise and commotion.

His nerves remind me of something Maryland women’s basketball coach Brenda Frese, who won the national championship in 2006, told me a couple of years ago.

“I think when I first came to Maryland, I had to figure out if I was good enough and I didn’t have the confidence behind me,” said Frese, who had three seasons of college head coaching under her belt when she took the job in 2002. “I was trying to survive a contract and not get fired. I didn’t know if I was gonna be good enough, so it was very singular (with) no balance. Obviously things change once you are validated. You gain the confidence, you gain experiences as a coach.”

Dale has never coached at the high school level. He needs his team more than he realizes, perhaps as much as they need him.

“I don’t want anybody in this locker room at halftime,” he says, almost talking to himself after the town sheriff is ushered out the door.

A movie makeup artist sits atop a ladder and spreads dirt - makeup of a sort - on an old school bus to be used in filing of the movie Hoosiers.

The parents have now completely turned on him. But he has the resolve to do things his way, not how the parents suggest. He kicks them out of the gym for practice – though the previous coach allowed them to watch – and pulls a player (Rade, played by Steve Hollar) from the floor who disobeys the passing rule and starts shooting (and making) shots.

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At the end of the game, you can see the angry players in the locker room sensing they have let him down.

They know he has their interests in mind from the preseason pep rally, where the crowd in the gym begins chanting “We want Jimmy!” as the players are introduced. Chitwood (Maris Valainis), the team’s best player, hasn’t decided to play yet.

“I would hope you would support who we are and not who we are not,” Dale tells the audience.

It’s a message to all parents, yesterday and today, about finding perspective in our kids’ sports, and giving a coach a chance from the start.

“He goes to bat for and protects his players,” says Sacks, the Positive Coaching Alliance’s CEO. “I think that goes a long way in building trust with them. He says this is the team, these are the players who made the commitment, and we will support them. Throughout the movie, you can see the strong bond between the coach and his players, even with the rocky start.”

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Norman Dale connects with his players through lighter moments

Chitwood delivers one of the most heralded lines of the movie when the school is about to oust Dale at a town meeting: I play, Coach stays. He goes, I go.

Two insubordinate players he has kicked off the team – including Buddy (Brad Long, whose reappearance is explained in a deleted scene) – also return for the team’s magical ride.

Along the way, Dale finds contributions from everyone, including Ollie (Wade Schenck), the short student manager who sinks two free throws to send the tiny farming town to the state finals. Strap (Scott Summers), a preacher’s son and another bench player, hits two crucial shots late in the same game.

Strap, of course, kneels to pray before playing, as he has done earlier in the movie.

“God wants you on the floor,” Dale says, relieving the tension of everyone around him, including the audience.

“These little pieces of humor help make connection with the players, and breaks up some of the nerves they might be feeling,” Sacks says. “It reminds me of some of the great interactions we get with coaches mic'd up in the Little League World Series (telling a joke to a pitcher to calm them down, etc).”

The PCA champions a coaching principle known as the ELM Tree of Mastery, which places focus on effort, learning and bouncing back from mistakes. Sacks says it creates a mastery environment for players to help their anxiety go down and confidence go up, leading to better results.

ELM Tree, Sacks says, is also embodied when the team arrives in Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis for the state championship. After his players walk wide-eyed into the large arena, Dale pulls out a tape measure and has them check the height of the basket and distance from the baseline to the free throw line.

“I think you’ll find these are the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory,” Dale says.

Sacks says his high school coach did it, too, before a state tournament game.

“(He’s) setting the foundation that this is something that we are used to,” Sacks says, “while the stage has changed, it's actually the same as what we do every day.”

Norman Dale acknowledges his mistakes, and that he's not perfect

Dale had elevated Shooter (Dennis Hopper), an assistant coach who struggles with addiction, to make a crucial call.

“When’s the last time somebody gave him a chance?” he asks Shooter’s son, who initially doubts his motive.

During the last huddle of the regional final, Dale had painted a picture of success, taking pressure off Ollie before his free throws.

“After Ollie makes his second shot − and you will make your second shot,” he says, pointing to the player, “get back on defense right away. There may just be enough time to throw a desperation toss.”

“I think Coach Dale tries to see the best in everyone − believing they deserve a second chance,” Sacks says. “He got one himself − which is a totally different topic regarding whether or not he'd be able to coach after the Ithaca incident!”

This is the one moment where the benefits of “Hoosiers” from a coaching perspective get murky. We learn Dale was given a lifetime suspension for physically assaulting one of his college players.

Neidorf, who played Everett, recalled for the “Darektor’s Cut” podcast, how Hackman the actor was prickly to work alongside. Neidorf said during the scene at the end of the movie, after Hickory has won, the players were instructed to find Hackman in the crowd. When they reached him, the actor said to them under his breath: Don’t touch me.

At other times, Hackman took time to teach his movie-set players how to act. Neidorf said he helped Valainis, who played Chitwood, try to find an agent in Hollywood after the movie.

Dale loosens on some things, too, distancing himself from the four-pass rule and conceding to the players’ wishes that Jimmy take the final shot, not be used as a decoy as the coach wants. “I’ll make it,” Jimmy says.

“Hoosiers” is inspired by the real-life story of Milan (pronounced My-lun), a downstate school that pulled a true upset over Muncie Central to win the state title in 1954.

Bobby Plump, the character on whom Chitwood is based, has said the scene of the final shot is an accurate rendition of what happened.

But he told The Washington Post’s Bill Gildea in 1995, "I was a very shy kid. I never would have said, 'I'll make it.' ”

It’s a reminder that while sports movies can seem perfect, no coach or team situation is. We learn to take what we learn from them – the words of wisdom, the empowerment, even the failures – into our next endeavor.

Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What can coaches today learn from Norman Dale of Hoosiers?

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