Luke Wilson Helps Tell Uplifting North Texas Baseball Story

‘You Gotta Believe’ explores underdog journey to Little League championship

Film director Ty Roberts had a goal — balancing the experience of viewing sports from a child’s perspective with telling a somber, multilayered story.

Roberts (of 12 Mighty Orphans), describes a good baseball movie that centers around inspirational young athletes as hard to beat, adding that “viewing sports from a child’s perspective again can be incredibly rejuvenating.”  

“Sometimes, seeing things simply — perhaps the way a child would — helps us identify what truly matters most,” Roberts said.

You Gotta Believe tells the story of the Fort Worth Little League team that captured the hearts of American viewers when playing Louisville in the longest game ever recorded in Little League World Series history. The game became an ESPN classic and pushed forward the Little League pitch count rule. 

The emotional story delves into the bonds formed among players as they rally around a teammate whose dying father helps coach the team. 

When portraying a boy’s experience when faced with the potential loss of a parent, and a father’s reality of “living on borrowed time,” the game of baseball became a metaphor for facing life’s challenges, Roberts said. “Every parent shares the universal fear of leaving our little ones’ lives prematurely … without our love and guidance.” 

Coach Ratcliff, played by Dallas native Luke Wilson, rallies the team of underdogs to a championship while undergoing cancer treatments. Following his courageous battle with cancer, Bobby Ratcliff died in 2003, a year after You Gotta Believe’s World Series game.

At the movie’s premiere in Fort Worth, Wilson joined the baseball team members, now all adults. 

Wilson attended Dallas’ St. Marks School of Texas, where he played football and ran track under Jerry Reese. Laura Wilson, Luke’s mom, is an award-winning photographer living in Preston Hollow.

Castmate, Greg Kinnear, also in attendance at the North Texas movie premiere, plays the team’s head coach. This isn’t Kinnear’s first experience representing a Texas story. In Same Kind of Different as Me, based on the memoir and bestselling book by author Ron Hall of Dallas, Kinnear played the role of Hall opposite Renee Zellweger and Djomon Hounsou.

You Gotta Believe was filmed primarily in Fort Worth. The film was produced by Austin-based Santa Rita Film Company and is being distributed by Well Go USA Entertainment. The AMC Palace 9 in Fort Worth hosted the movie’s premiere, and fans came out to celebrate the film’s connection to their hometown. The film premiered in theaters across the country Friday, Aug. 30.