As young Brandon Burlsworth gets pulled from his junior high football game, the coach of the Harrison Goblins comes up to give Burlsworth some words of advice.

“If you want to be a Harrison Goblin football player, then you need to be the first one at practice and the last one to leave,” Coach Tom Tice said.

Junior Parker Baugh stands on the sidelines listening to Peter Gray Lewis, who plays Coach Tom Tice, giving Ethan Waller, a young Brandon Burlsworth, a pep talk. A pep talk about not giving up and working your hardest. He is standing there listening to a pep talk that he knows is scripted, but still feels inspired. This inspirational speech set the tone for the rest of the movie.

“I was on crutches at the time, so I got to sit by young Burlsworth when the Harrison coach was giving him a pep talk. It was really cool,” Baugh said.

The movie, Greater, is about walk-on turned All-American football player Brandon Burlsworth. He took a risk and entered as a walk-on at the University of Arkansas, but tragically lost his life in a car accident eleven days after he was drafted by the Colts. The movie was largely shot in Arkansas, so many locals got an opportunity to be a part of the movie.

There was an open call for extras in the Northwest Arkansas Mall. You had to fill out the paperwork first, and then you would get a call for specific extra roll. Then, you could try out for a bigger part, like Chinese teacher Michelle Fries did. She was cast as the police officer who had to deliver the bad news about Brandon Burlsworth.

“I took my kids to try out that day and I ended up trying out myself, and I’m glad I did,” Fries said.

The experience was very different than what everyone expected. Fries expressed that there was not much direction with her lines. She expected to be coached more on how to say her lines than she actually was. There was a lot of downtime from when the actors and extras showed up to the time of actual filming. Marcom Fries sat in the same spot for multiple hours.

“There was a lot of waiting around, which I didn’t expect. I sat in a gym for four hours and sang the same song over and over again,” junior Marcom Fries said.

The movie was shot four years ago. There was a lot of time between filming and now, which led to some who were in the film forgetting about it. Others remembered and could not wait to see themselves on screen. Actors from Har-Ber were pleasantly surprised when they saw the movie. Fries and Baugh thought the movie was great quality and inspirational.

“It was a great movie, a really inspirational story,” Fries said.