Our Lady of Victory
From Hoopedia
Set in 1972, Our Lady of Victory tells the story of a sassy 23 year old tomboy whose life has been filled with a series of setbacks. On the brink of giving up and moving to the next phase of her life, she takes one final shot at being the head basketball coach at Immaculata College - an all girls catholic school. With help from the nuns, she finds the courage and faith to lead her team along the improbable journey of winning the first national championship in women's basketball.
The seedling of sweeping change is often traced back to a simple occurrence in a single person's life.
So let us trace back to an image of a typical American girl with floppy pigtails dribbling a basketball on a quiet sea-swept boardwalk in Atlantic City. She is consumed by the movement of the ball and the control she has over it. Around her back, through her legs, the balls bounds on command, an appendage following dutifully along to her destination of a school gymnasium.
It is here that the girl learns of life's obstacles, disguised as disappointment. The flyer taped to the door reports that the girl's basketball season has been cancelled, and adds, almost mockingly, cheerleading tryouts are being held.
We flash to the women the girl has become. She's striking, boldly blond and lithe, an athlete in a pinup's package. It's the time of change. The Movement is in full throttle in 1972, bubbling on state campuses and in front of government buildings. Lovely Cathy Rush, barely in her twenties, sees the women on the evening news. They carry their signs and burn their bras and chant in unison and preach the message: Equality.
Meanwhile, Cathy is newly married to a sporting man and walking the path to American housewife normalcy, about to place her dreams neatly on the bottom shelf of the pantry. For like most men, Ed Rush, a budding star as an NBA referee, wants children immediately and a wife at home to raise them, a full-time family to create a most Lordly picture of life.
Cathy feels restless. Man and woman can unite, she feels, without woman disappearing into man. She has dreams. A standout basketball player in college, she wants to coach the game now. She craves achievement and her own journey, one that will take her to a tiny Catholic college nestled into the rolling farmland, far away from the chaos of the times. It is here, a place where noise and IHM nuns come to rest, that she will take a group of ragtag girls in training to be wives and mothers to the first-ever women's National Collegiate Basketball Championship.
Cathy and her girls will battle religious and gender obstacles to become a team and find liberation in the most unlikely of places - a basketball court. And they will breathe life into a movement they knew little about, with Cathy Rush unwittingly becoming the godmother of women's sport.
Our Lady of Victory is a story about faith and commitment, part Hoosiers, part Sister Act. It's a film for anyone who has ever had a dream.
