Training Rules
| Training Rules | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by |
Dee Mosbacher Fawn Yacker |
| Produced by | Dee Mosbacher Fawn Yacker |
| Written by | Dee Mosbacher Fawn Yacker |
| Cinematography | Fawn Yacker |
| Edited by | Gina Leibrecht Gail Mallimson |
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Release date
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Running time
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63 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Training Rules is a 63-minute award-winning 2009 American documentary film co-produced and co-directed by Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker. It is narrated by Diana Nyad.
The documentary, subtitled as No Drinking, No Drugs, No Lesbians is a Woman Vision film. Director Mosbacher, a lesbian feminist activist filmmaker and psychiatrist established Woman Vision as a nonprofit organization, to promote tolerance and equal treatment of all people through the production and use of educational media,
Training Rules examines how women's collegiate sports, caught in a web of homophobic practices, collude in the destruction of the lives and dreams of many of its most talented athletes. It focuses on the women's basketball program at Pennsylvania State University under head coach Rene Portland and her policy of discrimination on her players based on their sexual orientation over a 27-year period as coach of the university's basketball program, particularly from the 1980s to the late 1990s.
According to testimony in the documentary, Rene Portland, who became Penn State's women's basketball coach in 1980, was open with her recruits about her distaste for gay individuals. She set the policy as "No Drinking, No Drugs, No Lesbians," letting every player know that being a lesbian or associating with lesbians would not be tolerated under any circumstance. If a player violated this "rule," she would be dismissed immediately; hence, the title of the film, "Training Rules."
After Portland had coached for 25 winning seasons at Penn State, Jennifer Harris, a player expelled from the program in 2005 who believes she was excluded because she was a lesbian, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed a lawsuit that prompted former Penn State players to come out to corroborate Harris’ story. In February 2007, when Portland and her co-defendants appeared on the verge of losing a legal judgment, the case was settled out of court. Portland then resigned in March 2007.
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