20 sports movies that scored big with kids

There are three Mighty Ducks movies and even a short-lived Disney+ series inspired by the film franchise. However, when push comes to shove, it’s the second in the series that really stands above them all. The Mighty Ducks fly to Los Angeles to compete in the Junior Goodwill Games. This one features a handful of new characters, a new setting, and a top-notch comedy that makes it the standout Ducks movie.

The Disney Channel used to deliver new movies monthly, and many of them were sports-based, including 1998’s Brink! Capitalizing on the increasing popularity of extreme sports at the time, Disney Channel took it upon themselves to interweave the story of a dad with back issues needing money because he’s out of work with his kid’s passion for in-line skating. It was a wild ride, but a fun one.

The success of Rocky made Hollywood want to bank on even more sports-driven content but it’s hard to pitch a movie about boxing starring a kid. So, they went the karate route, and Daniel LaRusso was born.

Every kid that broke their arm after July 1993 thought that they, too, would magically be able to play Major League Baseball once their cast was off.

The Big Green took a couple of fan favorites from The Sandlot, paired them with Steve Guttenberg for some reason, and placed them on a soccer field. The movie might not have become a cult classic like the baseball one before it, but it still offered hilarity and some important lessons on real-life issues.

Shad Moss, otherwise known as Bow Wow, was everywhere in the early 2000s, including starring in the basketball movie Like Mike. He played Calvin Cambridg, a 13-year-old kid living in an L.A. orphanage who stumbles upon a pair of sneakers with the initials “MJ” that give him Michael Jordan's basketball abilities.

Little Giants sits close to the top of kids sports movie excellence in that it’s not only a triumphant underdog story, but it also stars ‘90s Tiger Beat favorite Devon Sawa, as well as two icons as rival brothers: Rick Moranis and Ed O'Neill. Best of all, the best player was Icebox, a young girl who proved football isn’t just for boys, especially when you’re better than all of them.

Many of the movies on this list owe a lot to 1976’s The Bad News Bears. It really set the foundation for what makes kids' sports movies one of the best and most endearing genres.

One of the most marketable things in the early 2000s was sports featured in The X-Games, motocross included. So, Disney Channel wasted no time and made Motocrossed. It was hard to confuse what this movie was about, but it was more than dirt bikes. Family, secret identities, love, and more make Motocrossed a must-see.

If there was one thing the Olsen twins were going to do, it was play the same type of characters in almost everything they starred in and switch places. They did it as kids in It Takes Two and again in Switching Goals. The only difference between those movies is that one is centered around soccer.

Corbin Bleu and everyone’s favorite, Keke Palmer, took on the world of competitive Double Dutch in Jump In! While it’s not a sport that instantly comes to mind, that’s what makes it a unique sports movie.

Little Big League answers the question, “What if a 12-year-old inherited an MLB team?”

Air Bud, the movie about the golden retriever who plays basketball, inspired its own multiverse of sorts with even more movies about kids and athletic pups, as well as films in which monkeys are also getting on teams. Wild? Well, yes.

Rodney Dangerfield was at his best in Ladybugs, a movie in which he gets his girlfriend’s son to pretend to be a girl and play on a soccer team to impress his boss.

The Sandlot is to kids sports movies what The Exorcist is to horror, Beauty and the Beast is to animation, The Breakfast Club is to teen movies; it’s the cream of the crop, the standard.

Johnny Tsunami is a fish-out-of-water story, literally. The titular character moves from his beloved Hawaii to the cold realm of Vermont, where he has to learn to take his love of surfing to the slopes and dominate snowboarding.

Parents who are too extra, enemies turned besties, and basketball to top it all off.

Bowling is not always tossed into the conversation when it comes to sports, but those who’ve found themselves up at 2 a.m. on ESPN know all too well how intense the lanes can get. Those people would also enjoy the super cute Disney Channel movie about a bowling team, Alley Cats Strike.

Before Haley Joel Osment saw dead people, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was doing so. However, he did it at a baseball field, where he used his medium-like powers to help the California Angels turn their games around.

Will Ferrell approaches generational trauma with Kicking & Screaming as he uses his son’s soccer team to try and get over his own dad’s competitive nature.