When Harold Keith, winner of the coveted Newbery medal for his novel Rifles for Watie, wrote another award-winning book, Brief Garland, he likely never imagined that Brief Garland would someday be made into a movie entitled Believe in Me. The movie is about a girls’ basketball team in Sayer, Oklahoma in 1964.

Brief Garland was based on the true story of Harold Keith’s nephew, Jim Keith, who accepted a job in western Oklahoma coaching boys’ basketball. But when he arrived, he discovered that he had been assigned to coach the girls. The young coach was furious at having his original job taken away from him and being given what he considered a second-class assignment. A further plot twist evolved when one of his players married, had a baby, and wanted to return to the team—this in a time when married high school students were typically not allowed to participate in extracurricular activities.

The director of Believe in Me, Robert Collector, discovered Keith’s book when he noticed his own daughter reading it for the fourth time and decided to read it himself. “The decency of the people and the civil rights aspect for women really appealed to me,” Collector said in a recent interview. “In an age when I think money has ruined sports, the fact that I could do a story about people who wanted to play for the love of the game really inspired me.”

For those new to girls’ basketball mania, the game was originally played on a court divided into three parts. Nine girls played on each team. While players on either end could score, those in the middle section were only allowed to guard and pass the ball to their forwards. Later the court was divided into two sections, with three of six team members per team on either end (three forwards and three guards). Once again, only the forwards were allowed to shoot.

See the Movie
Believe in Me, which won first prize at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming film festival, will be released to the public for the first time on March 8. Fittingly, it will debut at the National Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee. It opens in other U.S. cities, including Oklahoma City, March 9.

Several of what Jim Keith calls “The Originals” who played on his Sayer team plan to rent a van and make the trip to Knoxville for the film’s debut. Producers are flying Keith to Tennessee and other cities to give talks promoting the movie and girls basketball.

For more on this delicious slice of Oklahoma March Madness, check out BelieveInMeMovie.com.

Molly Levite-Griffis was born in Apache, Oklahoma, the setting for four of her seven award-winning books. Her newest book, Simon Says (Eakin Press, $22.95), received the Oklahoma Book Award in the Young Adults category by the Oklahoma Department of Libraries. Look for it in bookstores now. The mother of two grown children, she is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma and lives in Norman. Visit her online at www.MollyGriffis.com.