Critics had every reason to object when Billy Bob Thornton remade The Bad News Bears a few years back. After all, Walter Matthau had already defined the role of foul-mouthed Coach Buttermaker, a cranky alcoholic who oversees a team of misfit little leaguers, in the perfectly serviceable 1976 original. Now we get yet another variation on the formula, this time starring Sam Rockwell as the last man you’d want coaching a varsity girls basketball team, in The Winning Season.

Strange that this second film from Grace Is Gone writer-director James C. Strouse could be so different from his debut (in which John Cusack played an emasculated widower who refuses to cope with the death of his wife in Iraq), and yet so similar to an entire subcategory of the underdog sports comedy. Some would argue that the girls basketball angle sets The Winning Season apart, but what little originality the film has going for it is the element it shares with the largely unseen (and widely unloved) Grace Is Gone –– namely, its observant yet underplayed attention to a fragile father figure.

Rockwell’s Bill is burnt-out by past disappointments, gets one day of custody with his daughter a week (she plays for a rival team, which makes for a particularly awkward scenario, when he coaches his girls on how to exploit her weakness) and reeks of alcohol without resorting to the usual device of showing him chugging a beer at all times. It’s convenient that Strouse has chosen a familiar enough genre that he can shorthand the exposition, which compliments the way he and his cast define character –– more through nuance and gestures than on-the-nose dialogue.

That’s not to say that Strouse doesn’t get off on writing hilariously inappropriate dialogue for Coach Bill to say within earshot of his team’s tender ears (when one of his more precocious players comes on to him, he says, “You’re not my type. I like bit tits and onion butts … It’s an ass that brings tears to your eyes.” But the most telling character moments are delivered between lines, such as a scene in which Bill bluffs about walking out on the girls if they don’t like his coaching style, then nervously waits in the hallway for someone to come out and fetch him. His insecure fidgeting, unsure whether the ploy will work, reinforces the idea that he really has no clue how to communicate with young women.

“I didn’t expect the other teams would be so much better. I thought everyone would kind of suck,” Bill tells them, with his usual insensitivity. After one particularly crushing defeat, it takes a hint from their lesbian bus driver Donna (Margo Martindale, bringing subtlety to another potential cliche) to cheer up the dejected team. She’s not only the good cop to his bad-boy routine, but an emotionally intuitive go-between capable of translating the girls’ needs back into terms he can understand. Their turnaround from four straight losses to a series of wins is unlikely to say the least (though, it should be said, no more so than believing Zac Efron as the Wildcats’ star player in High School Musical). With only six players, one of them on crutches, the lady Chargers need more than just a little tough love.

The advantage of having such a small team is that Strouse can give each of the girls more than just a single, superficial character trait. Plus, he’s got a great cast to work with, including Half Nelson’s Shareeka Epps, Quinceanera’s Emily Rios and rising star Emma Roberts. That should certainly help make The Winning Season commercial, which seems to be the consensus about those films acquired at Sundance this year (sure-thing success over risky, but high-quality pick-ups), though the film is atypically uninterested in whether or not the girls win their final game. At that point, what matters is how Bill, who’s forced off the team after being arrested for drunk driving, can manage to be a part of their moment of glory –– a situation that mirrors the jeopardized relationship with his own daughter. It’s a testament to Strouse and Rockwell’s talents that they can have us rooting for this deadbeat dad throughout, and yet so much of The Winning Season is safe-bet storytelling or the polishing of recycled parts, one hopes that the failure of Grace Is Gone hasn’t scared Strouse away from making more original and ambitious films in the future.