It’s All In the Game: The Leta Andrews Story
Narrated by Basketball Hall of Famer Bill Walton, the film tells the story of Granbury’s Leta Andrews, the winningest high school basketball coach in U.S. history.
Producer: Rare Breed Media
Director: Joel Walters
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She’s been immortalized in numerous halls of fame and in the basketball record books. Now, Granbury’s legendary Leta Andrews – the winningest high school basketball coach in U.S. history – will be featured in a documentary.
The film, entitled “It’s All In the Game: The Leta Andrews Story,” will be shown in her hometown of Granbury for one night only on Sept. 23. It will begin at 7 p.m. at the Granbury Live Theater on the square.
The evening will feature Andrews, of course, along with coaches, friends and fans she’s come to know over more than five decades of coaching, as well as family. Dale Hansen of WFAA/Channel 8 Sports will be the master of ceremonies.
Andrews’ record includes 1,416 victories over 52 years. She led teams to 16 state tournament berths at Comanche, Granbury and Corpus Christi Calallen, where she won her lone state title in 1990. Dunbar High School’s coach Robert Hughes, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in September, posted the most career wins for a boys’ coach, with 1,333 wins in 47 seasons.
Former Texas Christian University associate professor Janet Kelly wrote and produced the film for her company, Rare Breed Media, based in Granbury, where she has lived since 2002. “We started in 2012. It was a one-woman shop for a long time,” said Kelly.
“It’s a work of love. She’s just as outstanding a lady as she is a coach. Her husband, David, is outstanding also.”
The 56-minute film covers Andrews’ life from her upbringing on the family farm just outside Granbury through her entire coaching career. She was a two-time all-state player (once at guard, once at forward) in the mid-1950s, leading Granbury to back-to-back state finals.
“I am so humbled by this,” Andrews said of the film. “They did such a wonderful job telling my story and encompassing all of my history and memories. I’ve had such a great life, and I’m so glad they took the time to give it the right reflection.”
After several script rewrites and much research, Kelly said, Joel Walters of Fort Worth was brought on to direct. His background includes producing two documentaries on the Fort Worth Stockyards; A Marriage of Preservation and Progress was recently finished and Wall Street of the West has been aired numerous times on KERA TV/Channel 13 since 2001.
Walters has also produced a short documentary on a Colorado ministry organization called Rodeo Bible Camps of America. Parts of this documentary have been seen over the RFD-TV network, where he also produced and directed a regular TV program on cattle ranching and related subjects for over seven years called The American Rancher.
“I met Janet Kelly for coffee back in November 2015 and we went over the project and what she had experienced working in a distant fashion as her director/editor officed out of Los Angeles, and there seemed to be some disconnect to the working arrangement,” Walters recalled. “She had put time and money into it and had a cut that was almost two hours long, but she still wasn’t getting the story that she wanted.
“I liked Janet upon meeting her and I like sports. She had a good subject in Leta Andrews, and we agreed to take the material she had amassed and start from scratch. We focused on making a one-hour story that included biography-styled story points as well as sports accomplishments, which is what Janet wanted all along.”
They also landed Basketball Hall of Fame member Bill Walton, a former UCLA All-American and NBA star, to narrate the film.
“A remarkable person, Leta Andrews knew all kinds of people from basketball circles. One of the most prominent was the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden” for whom Walton played, Walters said. “Bill Walton said he would be glad to work with us as the host and narrator of the documentary.”
Andrews said working with Walton was “an incredible experience.”
“He was so nice. He welcomed us into his home,” she said. “He’s such a wonderful man, and so funny.”
Kelly said the film is also being broadcast over American Public Television stations through the Public Broadcasting System. She said a friend called her from Angel Fire, New Mexico, recently saying she saw it. She also said it has aired in Maryland, and Walters said it has hit stations in Alaska, South Carolina and Ohio.
They said it is slated to run on KERA locally, though no date has been announced.
“Janet has a real sharp marketing agent named Alexis, out of Atlanta, who is just a ball of fire, and she is working with TV stations on getting the program scheduled in a host of markets,” Walters said. “We’re hoping for a big splash.”
Kelly said she chose Andrews as a subject because she’d heard of her, and then her own mother had an experience with the coach.
“My mother met her and came home and told me how much she really enjoyed it,” Kelly said. “I said I’d love to do a film on her. Then, she and David came out to our ranch and I gave her my resume and met her. A few days later she called me and said, yes, she’d love for me to do the film.
“I’d read so much about her in the newspaper, so I was very familiar with her. She just seemed like the perfect subject. This is a moving story about a woman who inspired a lot of people.”
Like Kelly, Andrews is big on family. David Andrews even drove the bus to and from road games throughout her career, and they’ve been married almost 60 years.
“This movie is to celebrate her. She is who she appears to be,” Kelly said.
Walters said that although Andrews always coached girls teams, he has no doubt she could have been equally successful leading boys.
“She consistently modeled and demanded hard work and mentored thousands of young women. She is a person I have come to admire,” he said. “I think she could have straightened out a number of problematic men’s teams during her career.”