Really, there is only one sports movie. Hollywood just keeps fiddling with the details.

Still, when done well a sports movie can provide substantial pleasures. The blandly titled "Believe in Me" is one such charmer, a smart, low-keyed real-life melodrama that melds sports movie cliches with a nicely-rendered period setting and a big dose of girl power.

In 1964 basketball coach Clay Driscoll (Jeffrey Donovan) comes to Middleton High School in rural Oklahoma to run the boy's squad. He and his supportive wife Jean (Samantha Mathis) are looking forward to Jim's first gig as a head coach

But it's not to be. The principal who hired Jim has been incapacitated and the head of the school board, a ruthless small-town Babbitt (Bruce Dern), gives Jim's job to a crony. The newcomer is told he'll be coaching the girl's team, which hasn't won a game in living memory.

Clay reluctantly accepts the gig, gradually realizing that playing basketball is the only shred of independence and glory these girls will experience. In just a few months they'll be sucked into the drab ranks of aproned wives stranded on drought-ravaged farms.

Wanna bet that in his first season he takes his ladies to the championship game?

The crises faced by Coach and his girls aren't exactly life and death, but they tug at the heart. Clay's best player (Alicia Lagano) is forced to drop out by her religious Neanderthal of a father. Clay and Jean, meanwhile, are dealing with their own sorrow — Clay is sterile. And of course there's the ongoing struggle against sexism.

The performances are solid and Donovan, the star of the short-lived TV series "Touching Evil," is quietly spectacular, perfectly capturing the frustrations of a '50s-era male sinking in a sea of adolescent estrogen. The stunned, deer-in-the-headlights expression he presents whenever confronted with yet another incomprehensible (to him, anyway) display of female tears is both hilarious and oddly touching.

It's not a big-budget effort dripping with star power. But "Believe in Me" carries a hefty emotional clout. Over the final credits we see footage of the real Clay Driscoll, many years retired from coaching, being reunited with the women (now gray-haired grandmas) who played on his first team.

Even seasoned sports-movie junkies may find themselves groping for a hankie.