Church Ball
2006 film
Church Ball is a 2006 sports comedy film written and directed by Kurt Hale. It follows an underdog Latter-day Saint church basketball team and their attempts to make it to the championship in the league's last season. The film stars Andrew Wilson, Fred Willard, Clint Howard, and Gary Coleman. The film received negative reviews from critics and was a box office failure that earned just $464,991 against a $1 million dollar budget.
Plot
A local Utah LDS Church holds the record as having the worst basketball team in the church ball league. The team has failed to make it into the church tournament in the past 20 years. Due to rumors of this being the last year of the league, former team coach, and now Bishop Linderman (Fred Willard) has called Dennis Buckstead (Andrew Wilson) to coach a team made of clumsy misfits to the championship.
Church expectations of brotherly love, sportsmanship, and fellowship fall prey to competitive fierceness in the effort to win, while Dennis works to bring unity and cooperation.
Cast
Andrew Wilson as Dennis Buckstead
Fred Willard as Bishop Linderman
Clint Howard as Gene Jensen
Gary Coleman as Charles Higgins
Amy Stewart as Susan Buckstead
Production
Development and casting
The original script for the film was written years beforehand by Kurt Hale, Paul Eagleston, and Stephen Rose. Halestorm Entertainment began production of the film in 2005.
“Church Ball” enters the record as 2006 film. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Church, Ball and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5116553. The first chronological checks are 2006 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Church Ball” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.