This riveting true story of courage, strength, and football at the height of racial tension in Birmingham, Alabama, inspired the motion picture Woodlawn, and tells the story of Coach Tandy Gerelds, his running back Tony Nathan, and a higher school football game that healed a city.

Woodlawn is shortly to be a major film starring Jon Voight, Nic Bishop, and C. Thomas Howell.

Amid violent, impassioned racial tensions in Birmingham, Alabama, new football coach, Tandy Gerelds, was about Woodlawn struggling to create a winning football team at Woodlawn High School-one of the last schools in Birmingham to integrate. The group he was handed didn’t have the caliber of players he needed to win-until he saw Tony Nathan operate.

But Tony was African American and Coach Gerelds knew that putting him in as jogging back will be like drawing a target on his own back and the back of his soon-to-be celebrity player. But Coach Gerelds noticed something in Tony, and he understood that his decision to allow him play was about a lot more than soccer. It had been about doing what was right for the college…and the city.

And soon, the only place in the city where blacks and whites got along was on Trainer Gerelds’s football team. By using a new school chaplain, Tony discovered to appear beyond himself and realized that there was more on the line than winning a game.

In 1974, Trainer Gerelds’s interracial team made Alabama history drawing 42,000 fans into the stadium to watch them play. It had been this video game that brought on the unity and support of the Woodlawn SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL Colonels which finally allowed a town to heal and taught its citizens how to love.