An acclaimed documentary on girls basketball screens on island.

In the first few minutes of the documentary “Heart Of The Game,” Roosevelt High School girls basketball head coach Bill Resler is heard in a voiceover while playing a game of one-on-one with Darnellia Russell, the former star of the team.

“I’m very lucky to meet her,” he said. “I’ve told her 10 times already that she is my best chance to make me famous.”

She’s definitely fulfilled Resler’s prophecy.

The eight-year coach of the Roughriders was in town Sunday to speak after a showing of the critically acclaimed film at the Lynwood for a benefit for both the Bainbridge and North Kitsap girls basketball teams.

It’s the ninth time he’s fielded a question and answer session from audiences around North America. He’s also traveled to numerous places to do press for the film.

“To go on the run with Miramax and do all the advertising and have limos pick me up at my house has been weird,” Resler said as he sat at the Treehouse Cafe. “But it’s been a lot of fun. At the same time it’s been a lot of work.”

The work has been going on ever since filmmaker Ward Serrill met Resler at a dinner party at a friend’s house nearly ten years ago and decided to follow the eccentric college professor around for a year after watching him and the team during a game.

Once Russell stepped into the gym a year later, the one year project turned into seven years as Serrill filmed her dealing with numerous twists and turns on and off the court and how Resler, and the team, dealt with it.

Now, “Heart Of The Game” has a major distributor in Miramax, a famous narrator in multiplatinum rapper Ludacris and several appearances at notable film festivals around the world, including the Cannes Film Festival in France.

The film has been so well received, Resler said that movie critics Ebert and Roeper felt it would get an Oscar nomination.

Despite the jet-setting he’s done over the past year – he’s traveled to New York and Los Angeles twice and made a stop in Canada for the Toronto Film Festival – Resler feels that Miramax has gone about marketing the movie the wrong way.

“They’ve advertised the movie like a Tom Cruise movie,” he said. “But it’s not. It’s a community movie. That’s why it’s good to go to places like Bainbridge where there is (a) strong girls basketball team, strong basketball teams in general and a community that likes each other and talks to each other.

“This movie has a bunch of life lessons about community and so forth and that’s where it needs to be playing.”

He even took issue with the choice of the narrator as well – until Resler got to meet him.

“My instinct on that was, I was kind of upset when they hired Ludacris because I didn’t know about this hip-hop guy (talking about) women’s basketball,” he said. “I thought he was gonna take the thing over and ruin the flavor.

“But I couldn’t have been more wrong. It turns out he did the movie because he believes in the concept of empowering young ladies. He lended his name to the movie because he said, ‘I’m famous. More people will see it,’ and therefore the message will get out.”

Resler also said that the rapper “worships” Darnellia, even going so far as to have her and her mother on stage for this year’s Summer Jam and taking the two out to dinner when they were in New York.

While the publicity and the travel is nice, Resler ultimately hopes that people can take one message from the movie.

“The most important thing – and I feel this really strongly – is never judge people by their mistakes,” he said. “Judge them by how they fix their mistakes.

“An adjunct of that is ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine.’ I disagree with that completely. To err is to human, to forgive is mandatory.”

Resler also revealed at the question and answer session that the Roughriders and the Spartans will play each other Jan. 15 at Bellevue Community College.

Lynwood Theatre continues its showings of the film through Thursday. For times, see www.lynwoodtheatre.com.