Woodlawn

Woodlawn opens in theaters 16 October.

Trailer on YouTube

In the midst of violent, impassioned racial tensions in Birmingham, Alabama, new football coach, Tandy Gerelds, was struggling to create a winning football team at Woodlawn High School—one of the last schools in Birmingham to integrate. The team he was handed did not have the caliber of players he needed to win—until he saw Tony Nathan run.

But Tony was African American and Coach Gerelds knew that putting him in as running back would be like drawing a target on his own back and the back of his soon-to-be star player. But Coach Gerelds saw something in Tony, and he knew that his decision to let him play was about more than football. It was about doing what was right for the school…and the city.

And soon, the only place in the city where blacks and whites got along was on Coach Gerelds’s football team. With the help of a new school chaplain, Tony learned to look beyond himself and realized that there was more at stake than winning a game.

In 1974, Coach Gerelds’s interracial team made Alabama history drawing 42,000 fans into the stadium to watch them play. It was this game that triggered the unity and support of the Woodlawn High School Colonels and that finally allowed a city to heal and taught its citizens how to love.

Tandy Gerelds, the coach at Woodlawn at the time, is one of the greatest men I have ever had the pleasure to meet in my life and it was an honor to play football for him when he was the coach at my alma mater, Deshler High School, in Tuscumbia, AL.

In 10 years (1984-1994) at Deshler Coach Gerelds compiled a record of 101-34, won the 4A State Championship in 1990 and set an Alabama all-class record of 603 points scored in a season running the old-fashion Wing-T (I think that record was eventually broken by Hoover).