Who living in Southeastern Idaho or Utah has never experienced church ball? Clear back as a teenager, I use to connect with friends; and we would battle it out at one of the local ward gyms, bones crushing against bones, sweat flying everywhere, chests heaving from full exertion. During these moments of nostalgia, I recall those events of bygone days as fantastic. With the delusion of age, I only remember my LDS friends and me as the invincible team from Glory Road.

But even now as a dad with four kids of my own, my spine still tingles with excitement when I step onto the hardwood floor of a ward gym. Now it is my ten-year old who diligently practices with other boys in hopes of being the mighty Hoosiers.

With all my background of being on a church gym floor, I rented the DVD, Church Ball. It might be a surprise to some but I have enjoyed some of the LDS flicks. They don’t carry the smut of Hollywood, like brutal and gory violence, crude sexual content, nudity, explicit sexual situations, crude language, cursing, strong profanity, graphic vulgarity, explicit drug use, and every other kind of foul nuance that can be dreamed up under the sun.

And hooray for those who designed ClearPlay!

But the humor of Church Ball seemed bizarre, extremely out of character for the LDS film industry. The script of this film tried to achieve the famed corkiness of Napoleon Dynamite but failed because of the flippancy over spiritual concepts. But maybe that was the whole point – frontload the presentation of religion with satire. That sounds like Hollywood.

I don’t think a movie like this helps LDS or evangelicals among pockets of community in Southeastern Idaho that are completely skeptical of religion.

Yet despite the movie, you can still pass me one of those basketballs dubbed with the title. I am ready to play.