Film Review: "Trophy Kids."

Leland Anderson produced and wrote a film about abusive parents in sports.

This is sort of a follow-up post to the recent one announcing the passing of former Attleboro High School basketball star Leland Anderson, who lost his battle with lung cancer at 43 a few weeks ago. 

As I mentioned in that post, about a decade ago Anderson served as a producer and co-screenwriter for a documentary film called "Trophy Kids," made while the former Attleboro athlete was living in Santa Monica, Calif. It first appeared on HBO in 2013, and is currently available on Prime Video. It also served as a springboard for another limited series about the topic.

I had not seen the film before, even though I had known about Anderson's participation in it since Peter Gobis wrote about it for The Sun Chronicle not long after it was made. But, given Anderson's untimely passing, I decided to finally take a look at it last night.

Well, it was absolutely chilling. 

It was a brutally honest look at the excessive pressure that can be put on high school-aged kids when their parents lose their perspective and try to create superstar scholarship athletes out of their children. The film really drives home the fact that these overbearing parents have no regard at all for what emotional and psychological damage they are doing to their kids.

It was a hard thing to watch in 2013, I'm sure. And the lessons within are still valid for parents in 2024 and beyond.

The film is set in the greater Los Angeles area, involving six young athletes and five parents that are unrelentingly driving their kids to achieve at a high level. It has a frightening degree of access to each family, and in each case, viewers are not spared the warts and all. From the moment when we are introduced to each family group to the finish, the parents' obsessive drive to push their children to greatness escalates to the point where we observers are screaming at the screen for the parents to lighten up and let the kids just be kids.

I know I was. 

Here's the lineup:

** We're first introduced to the father of a freshman football player at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, a promising wide receiver and safety who is locked into a very aggressive daily training and practice regimen by his father, who played for the University of Washington.

** Next is a promising young basketball player at Redondo Union High School, a 6-2 shooting guard that has stopped growing -- to the great disappointment of his runty New York-transplant father, a stereotypical figure that could have been lifted from the pages of a script for "The Sopranos."

** Alongside that ghastly stereotype at Redondo Union is a seemingly less irritating father of the team's point guard, who is battling injuries and having a hard time keeping his starting job. As we learn over the course of the film, the father is blaming all of his kid's problems on the 11-year-veteran coach of the team, and he is quietly plotting to convince the school board to fire the coach.

** Up next is the father of a 9-year-old girl that is somewhat of a golf phenom. The dad has no talent of his own, but when he's not standing right next to the coach he hired to help the girl grow in the sport, he is caddying for her during tournaments. His constant negativity often reduces the girl to tears during the course of competition.

** Our final parent is an evangelical Christian mother of middle-school-aged twin boys, who she believes she can transform into championship-level athletes with a constant regimen of training and the power of prayer. She might be the most annoying of the lot because of her proselytizing and passive-aggressive presence in the life of her twins.

In each case, the young athletes eventually fail to reach the desired level of immediate accomplishment as set by their parents, and the conflict between being driven to succeed as opposed to being normal kids makes all of the young athletes victims of a very insidious form of child abuse.

The young football player eventually cracks under the constant boot-camp pressure. During a visit to his mother, who divorced the father and lives in Seattle, the father explodes in a torrent of rage when the son finally sheds his intense fear and tells the old man that he's had enough of the constant brow-beating. After that, the son moved back into his mother's home and went to high school in the Seattle area, where he would be free of the pressure to be turned into the superstar athlete that his father failed to be. Justus Moore graduated from high school in 2015 and did not play football after that.

The shooting guard's father is eventually banned from his son's games because of the constant invective-laced commentary he spewed from the sidelines about the officials, the coach and players on the opposing teams. Freed of his father's embarrassing presence, Derek Biale plays well enough to earn a Division 2 scholarship at a school in Colorado. The father claims at film's end that he will go to all of his son's games in Colorado, home and away. The younger Biale is now a fitness instructor and AAU coach in the Phoenix area. 

Meanwhile, the Redondo Union point guard threatens to transfer to another school at the end of his junior season unless his father can get the coach fired. The scheming father is successful at that, and the kid stays. But the kid certainly acts in interviews as if he's buying into his father's refrain that his shortcomings were the fault of the coach and others, and not possibly because of his own limitations as a player. In other words, he appears to have been brainwashed by his father's influence. Ian Fox eventually played at Fullerton College and is now a real estate agent in the Los Angeles area.

Amari Avery is the most successful of the Trophy Kids.

The young golfer, whom we see in tears and pleading for her father to stop berating her, continues to play. The next year, her father was not allowed to caddy for her in regional tournaments. Her name is Amari Avery, and she is still a golfer; she was member of the Class of 2026 and women's golf team at the University of Southern California, and was rated among the nation's top 10 amateurs, but decided last year to leave school and turn professional. Hopefully her life course has since been a lot happier than what was depicted in the film.

And the tennis twins seemed to be the ones least negatively affected by their mother's constant presence. They entered high school the next year and made the junior varsity tennis team. But they were also very reserved and their social development appeared to be hindered by being smothered 24/7 by Mom and Jesus. Blake and Tanner Suard now play something called "beach tennis" in Southern California. They never made it to Wimbeldon.

As I said, it's a chilling film. It's a classic tale of how damaging it can be for parents to become so vicariously involved in their children's competition, they are trying to erase their own failed lives and replace them by claiming their kids' accomplishments as their own.

I won't speculate why Leland Anderson would have involved himself in this project. But I'm glad he did. If I had my choice, I'd make it required viewing for every parent of every high school athlete before the very first day of competition every year. 

I've known many wonderful parents over my half-century of local sports journalism, and I've also known my share of insufferable ones. When you're a parent, you have two choices of direction on the day when your child decides to become an athlete, and Anderson's film pulls no punches in illustrating what the wrong direction is.

Anderson scored a lot of points and won a lot of games at Attleboro High, and was one hell of a basketball player. This film, however, may be his best legacy.

Trophy Kids (2013): Directed by Christopher Bell. Produced by Leland Anderson and Christopher Bell. Executive Producers: Peter Berg, Jake Wood. Written by Leland Anderson, Christopher Bell, T.J. Mahar. 107 minutes.