The movie “Remember The Titans” is about a high school football team during the early 1970’s that has been changed into a racially divided team. The original team that is not so happy with this new change is forced to go to a boot camp that will not only train them for the new season, but also for team building.
The character I believe that changed the most was Gerry Bertier (played by Ryan Hurst). At the beginning Gerry is portrayed as a typical high school jock on the football team, and when he finds out his school is going to become inter-racial he is not happy about it, considering he is slightly racist. Gerry is completely against playing with the new players which he refers to as “black animals”. Gerry decides he is not going to play that season as there will be a new coach, so he starts a petition, but is convinced to stay on the team as his original coach is staying. When Gerry first meats the new coach, Coach Boone, he feels that they don’t need his coaching, but his courage is lowered as Boone tells him off and becomes intimidated. This is the first time we begin to see change in Gerry’s attitude, although not much.
As soon as the team arrives at camp, Gerry immediately gets into a fight with one of the new players. The fight isn’t over anything important, but more so caused as there is a lot of tension in the air. When he hears another team mate talk about how he isn’t going to block for him while playing, Gerry sticks up for him, saying he needs to, this is the first time we see him looking past race. When Gerry and Julius are forced to get to know each other, we realize that Gerry is racist, but stubborn and he just wants his teams to play with each other. After realizing that his guys weren’t putting their full effort into the game, Gerry yelled at one of his own guys to block for Julius. After the team seeing what had happened and how well Gerry and Julius had gotten along, the rest of the team all started to play well together, and eventually become friends.
After training camp, Gerry had then become friends with the rest of the team. After seeing that one of his mates was discriminating his teammates, and not playing equally, he was forced to make his own decision and cut him from the team, showing that he cared more about his teammates more so than he did his own friends. When Gerry comes back to his town to see that people