Remember the titans (Character Analysis)

 

Coach Boone is an African American coach who is offered a job as head coach of an American football team at Williams high school in Virginia.

Despite this nice proposition, he is not sure of accepting the place because, according to him, he was chosen not for his qualities but for his African-American origins. He also knows that the school wants to clear itself from any form of racism. It is more than implied in the movie.

Back home, all his neighbors congratulate him abundantly for helping so much to fight racism. He therefore decides to accept the job, to prove to everyone that black people are not inferior. He also sees the situation as a chance to prove he is the best coach.

To create his team he meets a lot of resistance from the whites to the idea of sharing a group with Afro Americans. Of course, before coach Boone, the football players were exclusively white people, and no one thought to be under the coaching of a black man one day in his life.

Coach Boone is someone very strict and tough but he is also understanding and does his best for the team, so throughout the story, he does everything he can to have the best team sportingly speaking and the least racist possible. To reach his goal, he creates a mixed black-white team which is new for the time and never yields in to any whim of one or the other. He is therefore the main character of the story who leads the American football team to eventually win the championship.

I find this character touching because he is a person who works on merit. His guideline is: no matter your skin color, if you don't deserve the place, you won't get it. A very good example of this behavior is when he almost refuses the job because he considers that he was chosen for his skin color and not for his merit. This character trait will follow him throughout the story and will be one of this team’s pillars.