“I’m supposed to wear myself out for the team? What team? No, no, what I’m gonna do is I’m gone look out for myself, and I’m gone get mine.” Julius Campbell (Wood Harris) yelled that in captain Gerry Bertier’s (Ryan Hurst) face. Pretty hard to believe this same team would go on to a 13-0 season and to be Virginia State Champions, first runner ups at the National Championship, and the 2^nd best High School team in the Country. The perfect season.

In Boaz Yakin’s 2000 film, Remember The Titans, Coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) coaches a football team at a newly-integrated high school, T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1971. Based on a true story, the Titans of T.C. Williams teach us how sport can turn two opposing groups into one championship team.

When Coach Boone’s new football team prepared to leave for football camp at the end of summer, they were divided between the white players that attended Hammond High School before the integration and the black players that attended GW High School. Thanks to the new head coach, they were forced to sit together, room together, and learn about each other during the span of the two-week camp. To the surprise of the students and the coaching staff, the players formed an intense bond to help them achieve their overall goal of winning a championship that season.

Through protests, in-school fights, bigotry and criticism, the Titans kept their tight-knit team together. Under the command of assistant coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton) and Boone, the Titans continued to win games, much to the shock of everyone around them, and forced a sense of acceptance throughout the community. Even the adults in the town stopped looking at the head coach as a threat and started looking at him as someone they could respect. By no means were things perfect, but they were definitely headed in the right direction, and it seems as though football did that.

There was an extreme closeness between Campbell and Bertier, who started out sworn enemies. The night of the regional victory,  Bertier, the All-American, gets paralyzed in a heart-breaking car accident, and  Campbell takes the news extremely hard. Facing adversity once again, the Titans made Bertier proud and went on to win the state championship.

It may seem silly at first, a football team helping to ease a town into an integrated high school, but Boone and his boys proved it possible when they not only won games, but demonstrated that if we just simply worked together, anything could be achievable. Remember the Titans truly was an inspirational story because it pulled each viewer in emotionally as the team’s success progressed, and really gave each viewer a feel for the times as they continually faced adversity whether it was from coaches, teammates, refs, or just close-minded people.

With the outstanding cast of Denzel Washington, Will Patton, Wood Harris, Ryan Hurst, Donald Faison, Hayden Panettiere, Ryan Gosseling and many others, Boaz Yakin beautifully portrayed the story of a high school football team that united a segregated community, and reminded us to never underestimate the power of football.