AllMovie

Rick Derby's sweetly elegiac Rocks With Wings is an exciting sports documentary that also delves into contemporary Navajo culture. The film explores race relations and the impact of a surprisingly successful high school girls' basketball program, not just on the team's players, but on their depressed community. The film posits a culture clash between an iconoclastic and demanding black coach, Jerry Richardson, and the timid Navajo players, who take his harsh criticisms, which are meant to toughen and inspire them, too much to heart. Derby explores Richardson's hardscrabble background to explain the coach's fierce determination, and also looks at how the harsh realities of reservation life created a situation where these talented girls needed a push to believe in their own talents, but recoiled at the unrelenting criticism leveled by their coach Richardson's struggle to find a balance -- to inspire and push the girls without alienating or psychologically damaging them -- is as compelling as all the well-edited game footage Derby uses. Through compromise and growing trust, team and coach eventually come together to overcome their obstacles, on and off the court, in an inspiring display. A hit on the festival circuit, Rocks With Wings doesn't have the immediacy and the detail of Hoop Dreams, but its canny melding of social commentary, personal drama, and sports action merits comparison to that seminal documentary.