The High School Coach in Above the Rim (1994) is Incredibly Irresponsible

Note: This piece contains major spoilers about Above the Rim. It’s a good movie and I think you should watch it, so if you’re averse to spoilers, watch it first and then come back.

March Madness is officially upon us, and it’s a good time to be a Hoya. (Shouts out to the legend Patrick Ewing and his Big East champions.)

The spring of 1994 was also a good time to be a Hoya. It’d been several years since Coach John Thompson Jr. had been to the Final Four, but that was beside the point, because Above the Rim was bigger than the NCAA Tournament.

Above the Rim arrived in the midst of a basketball movie boom. (It was released in March and was already the third basketball movie of that year!) It’s a film that gave us memorable performances from a charismatic Tupac Shakur and a young Wood Harris and Leon (no last name, just Leon), among others. It’s about second chances and consequences and haunting memories and sacrifices, but mostly it’s about a high school basketball player who really wants to play for Georgetown.

That young man is Kyle Lee Watson. He’s easy to root for and incredibly talented with the rock, but he’s also kinda selfish and a little bit angry and rather impressionable. His coach, Coach Rollins, is presented as a positive role model determined to help Kyle with these issues. Unfortunately, Coach Rollins is also an irresponsible knucklehead.

You see, Coach Rollins signed up to run a team in a local street ball tournament called the Tournament Shoot Out (which is not a very creative name). This tournament apparently takes place in the middle of the high school season, which is a weird choice for multiple reasons. (We’ll ignore the weather reason, even though the high school basketball season only runs through March in New York and I think it’s weird to host an outdoor tournament in late winter.)

The most obvious reason why Coach Rollins is being irresponsible is that he’s putting his players—Kyle, most notably—at risk of injury. Is any amount of cash, prizes, or bragging rights to be gleaned from this tournament worth jeopardizing your actual high school basketball season that pays your bills? (If you said “yes,” you are a bad basketball coach.)

But there’s another reason why recruiting his star player for an extracurricular tournament is a bad idea. That reason is because one of the best teams in the Tournament Shoot Out is coached by a notorious drug dealer. (This is Tupac’s character, Birdie.) Is Coach Rollins simply unaware of Birdie’s street status? Seems highly unlikely, considering that Birdie attends Coach Rollins’ games, and also considering that Birdie’s older brother Shep played for Coach Rollins years ago.

As luck would have it, Coach Rollins’ team faces Birdie’s team in the finals. And just when it looks like Birdie’s team has a victory in hand, Shep forces a turnover and hits Kyle for the winning bucket, at which point Birdie loses it and commands one of his henchmen to shoot Shep in broad daylight. (The trigger man, Wood Harris, would go on to portray a professional drug dealer and amateur basketball coach himself in The Wire.)

Now, as bad as attempted murder is—extremely bad, to be sure—putting his player in harm’s way isn’t even the worst thing Coach Rollins does, in my opinion.

You see, Kyle really wants to play for Georgetown. He wears Georgetown gear throughout the film, and no other college programs are even mentioned. Kyle’s ultimate goal is the NBA, but he has allowed himself exactly one collegiate avenue to get there.

When the Tournament Shoot Out comes around, Kyle turns down Birdie and agrees to join Coach Rollins’ team at the last minute. Then, after they’ve already played multiple games in this tournament, Coach Rollins casually pulls Kyle aside and says, “Oh, this came to the office for you yesterday.” It’s a letter. From Georgetown. Excuse me? Hold on.

Was Coach Rollins…withholding Kyle’s Georgetown offer letter from him out of spite because he didn’t join his Tournament Shoot Out team? Frankly, it doesn’t matter. This is your star player. And this is the news he’s been dreaming about for years. If you don’t immediately inform Kyle when this letter arrives—call his mother, interrupt his class, wait on his doorstep, something—you aren’t just a bad coach, you’re an asshole.

Thankfully, Coach Rollins’ irresponsible actions don’t cost Kyle his senior season, or his college scholarship, or his actual life. And if we are to assume that Above the Rim’s events are happening in the present day, Kyle goes on to join Georgetown’s 1994 recruiting class—the same class that featured one Allen Iverson.

Above the Rim is now streaming on HBO Max and is available to rent elsewhere.