Seann William Scott stars in Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach as Gary Houseman, a washed-up tennis player. Gary was raised in a very competitive household where his father encouraged his sons to play tennis. After being expelled from college, Gary traveled to Mexico to play, and then returned to the U.S., finding himself in Lincoln, Nebraska. Vowing to be done with tennis, he takes a job as a custodian at a high school. But, he finds himself drawn to the school's tennis courts, where he meets tennis coach Lew Tuttle (Randy Quaid). Gary admits that he has some experience with tennis, and is asked to help with the team, which is a ragtag group of losers who have never won a match. Gary enthusiastically leaps into the task, but things quickly change when Coach Lew dies. Gary is then paired with teacher Steve Peters (A.D. Miles) to coach the team. With Coach Lew gone, will someone as crude and unorthodox as Gary be able to guide a group of high school boys to tennis perfection?

According to IMBD.com (whose information can be suspect), Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach was shot in late 2006. So, where has it been and why wasn’t it released in theaters? Couldn’t Seann William Scott open a movie? Unless you are totally new to the world of movies, you know where this line of questioning is going. I only had to watch a few minutes of Balls Out before I understood why no one had ever heard of it.

Taking a step back for a moment, the idea to use tennis in a sports spoof is a good one. The sport hasn’t been used in that many serious movies (Wimbeldon, Match Point), so audience won’t feel as if they’ve seen it before. And tennis is often viewed as such as uppercrust and high-class sport that lampooning it should be a riot.

Given those ideas, having Balls Out give tennis the business should have been easy. Well, apparently it’s much harder than it looks. The movie has the right frame of mind, as Gary is the opposite of what we would expect from a tennis player. He’s dirty, foulmouthed, and appears to be totally oblivious to the niceties of society. (He makes McEnroe look like a saint.) And, as one would expect, Seann William Scott plays this role to the hilt. He takes his Stifler character from the American Pie films and actually makes him more repulsive due to the fact that Gary doesn’t seem to have any sort of hygiene regimen.

Having an obnoxious tennis coach isn’t really enough to carry a movie, but at least it’s something which an audience would immediately grasp. The problem with Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach is that it tries to hard to be multi-dimensional. In theory, Gary should stand out as the oddball here, but it seems that everyone in town has issues, from the principal’s insane 8-year old daughter (who has the best lines in the film) to Gary’s “ringer” to even Coach Lew himself. Inhabiting the film with so many oddball characters results in overkill, and the movie begins to lose its sense of reality. Which is a mistake, as there’s another part of the film which wants to be taken seriously. I’m not sure if the serious tone came from the writers or Director Danny Leiner, but there are some moments in the movie (such as those dealing with Coach Lew’s daughter or Gary’s star player’s family) which are played straight. But, these subplots also mirror things which we’ve seen in straight-forward sports movies. So, the question must be asked, were these moments supposed to be funny and they simply flopped more than the other jokes in the film, or was there a mis-communication with the filmmakers in how the tone of the film would play out? Along these same lines, Gary’s character isn’t very well-defined. He comes across as an incredibly gross person, and yet he seems to care about others.

Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach volleys onto DVD courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. The film has been letterboxed at 2.35:1 and the transfer is enhanced for 16 x 9 TVs. The image doesn’t show any distracting grain, and it’s fairly sharp, but it has an overall flatness which is difficult to describe. It doesn’t necessarily look like VHS quality, but it has a low-budget look, like we’re watching a copy and not something taken directly from a master. The colors are never bright and there’s no crispness to the image. However, artifacting and video noise are kept to a minimum. The DVD carries a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track which provides clear dialogue and sound effects. The stereo and surround effects are quite good, given the questionable quality of the video. The stereo effects work well with the tennis matches and some crowd scenes. Likewise, any scene with a crowd, or especially the scene at the school dance, provide good surround sound effects. However, subwoofer effects are at a minimum.

The Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach DVD only has a few extras. The DVD has six DELETED SCENES which run about 6 minutes. Most of these are simply moments which were cut out of scenes already in the film, and most are forgettable except for the final one. There is a 2-minute reel of OUTTAKES. "Tennis Anyone?: The Making of Balls Out" (11 minutes) is a fairly good featurette which contains comments from the actors and the screenwriters. The writers give a little background on the story and the actors talk about the production, including the tennis training.