What Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that the movie features kids cursing, behaving badly, fighting, and drinking non-alcoholic beer. Their poor role model is their coach, who drinks (to the point of passing out), smokes, swears, hangs out at a strip club, makes racist and sexist comments (as well as ignorant wisecracks about a boy in a wheelchair and another who is overweight), and teaches one of the kids to make martinis. As the coach works as an exterminator, the movie also features visual jokes about dead rats and insects. Though the coach learns to be a more tolerant and mature adult, he remains ornery, and has one-night sex with the mother of one of his players.
- Families can talk about the film's treatment of the kids' differences in skills, sizes, attitudes, and backgrounds. While the coach is equally abusive to all the children, the film also makes some visual jokes based in their appearances, accents, and first languages (two brothers speak only Spanish). How does Amanda deal with being the only girl in the league? How do the kids learn to work together as a team? How does the coach get over his long-held bitterness and learn to appreciate imperfection?