General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training is a 1977 American comedy and the first sequel to the 1976 hit The Bad News Bears, following the same youth baseball team on an unsupervised road trip to an exhibition game at the Houston Astrodome. It was directed by Michael Pressman, written by Paul Brickman, and produced by Leonard Goldberg for Paramount Pictures, and it runs 99 minutes with a PG rating.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	Los Angeles opening 29 July 1977; New York opening 19 August 1977¹
Principal cast	William Devane (Mike Leak), Clifton James (Sy Orlansky), Jackie Earle Haley (Kelly Leak), with returning Bears including Chris Barnes (Tanner Boyle) and Jimmy Baio (Carmen Ronzonni)¹
Crew	Director Michael Pressman; writer Paul Brickman; producer Leonard Goldberg; cinematographer Fred J. Koenekamp¹
Missing stars	Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal were not approached because their characters did not appear in the script¹
Working titles	Bad News Bears II and Making Friends; Paramount settled on the final title by 9 February 1977¹
Critical standing	42% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (65 reviews); 40% on the audience Popcornmeter (500+ ratings)²
Follow-up	The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)³

Spoilers

Plot

The Bears, a ragtag San Fernando Valley youth baseball team, reconvene without their former coach and star pitcher. A strict new coach, Mr. Manning, prepares them for a game at the Houston Astrodome whose winner will travel to Japan to play a Japanese team, but he fires catcher Mike Engelberg over the team's lack of discipline, and Kelly Leak's disruption of practice leads the players to walk out, ending Manning's tenure.¹

With teammate Timmy "The Big Looper" Lupus sidelined by a broken leg, the team needs both a coach and a decent pitcher. Kelly recruits a new pitcher, Carmen Ronzonni, who has moved from the East Coast, and presents the local park's elderly groundskeeper, Lester Eastland, as the Bears' new coach. The players trick their parents into believing Lester will chaperone them, then depart for Texas without adult supervision in a possibly stolen van driven by the thirteen-year-old Kelly.¹

On the road, Kelly seeks out his divorced father, Mike Leak (William Devane), who lives in Texas, and persuades him to serve as the team's new manager so the Bears can play the Astrodome exhibition game.² In the locker room on game day, with the team worried that Kelly will not return, Tanner Boyle delivers a "win one for the Big Looper" speech modeled on Knute Rockne, All American, and Kelly arrives at the last minute.¹ Paramount's own synopsis describes the Bears gaining a coach, dumping him, adding a pitcher who cannot get his fastball over the plate, and going on to a comeback victory with all eyes on Japan.⁴

Production

Paramount announced the sequel in August 1976, with the television veteran Leonard Goldberg making his feature-film producing debut. A December 1976 report said the twenty-six-year-old Michael Pressman would direct and collaborate with Paul Brickman on the script, though Pressman is not credited as a writer. Casting calls for boys aged twelve to sixteen were issued in San Antonio, Texas, to complete both the Bears and their Texas opponents.¹

Casting changes. Casting changes: Gary Lee Cavagnaro, the heavyset catcher Mike Engelberg of the first film, dropped thirty pounds, and the role was recast with Jeffrey Louis Starr, an untested actor spotted while watching a Veterans of Foreign Wars parade in Anna, Illinois, who was given a seven-year Paramount contract.¹ William Devane took the adult lead of Mike Leak to counter his image as a heavy from films such as Marathon Man and Family Plot (both 1976).¹

Locations and disputes. Production began on 1 March 1977, filming for three weeks in the Los Angeles suburbs before moving to Houston; other locations included El Paso, Texas, and the Paramount lot in Hollywood.¹ While shooting in Houston, a Harris County commissioner objected to filming at public parks used by area Little Leagues. Little League of America officials, upset by the first film's language, had forbidden the producers from using the Little League name; the dispute went to court, and a judge who read the script ruled that the production could use the fields.¹

The Astrodome crowd. For scenes in the Astrodome, Paramount needed a crowd of about 10,000 people and offered cash prizes worth $15,000 as an incentive. When too few people came, the studio hired 4,000 extras and went $60,000 over budget.¹ The end credits acknowledge the cooperation of the Houston Astrodome and the Houston Astros.¹

Reception

Most critics found the film inferior to the original. Arthur Knight's 25 July 1977 Hollywood Reporter review went so far as to say, "Almost everything is wrong with this picture," and was particularly annoyed that the sequel seemed to embrace the win-at-all-cost attitude the first film had satirized.¹ Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus calls it a poor imitation of its predecessor leaning on cheap sentimentality and forced hijinks; the site records a 42% Tomatometer from 65 reviews and a 40% audience score.² On Metacritic, the Washington Post's Gary Arnold called it fitfully, harmlessly diverting but fundamentally derivative, and TV Guide gave it 25 out of 100.⁵

Some reviewers were warmer. A 1977 Catholic Film Office commentary judged the sequel passable and noted that it works against goody-goody expectations of children's films, maintaining appeal for the hard-to-please 10-to-16 age group.⁶ A retrospective audience review on Rotten Tomatoes argues that, for a sequel without the original stars, director, or writer, it works surprisingly well, crediting the heartfelt storyline between Kelly and his father and the film's nostalgia value.²

In a 1978 Washington Post critique of the series, Arnold wrote that the first sequel missed a bet by failing to incorporate the kids' parents, depicting the team traveling to the Astrodome without adult supervision, a "liberated" fantasy that required drafting a substitute for the original coach-father figure as soon as the Bears arrived in Houston.⁷

Place in the series

The film is the second of three theatrical features about the Bears. It was followed by The Bad News Bears Go to Japan in 1978, and the franchise later included a two-season CBS sitcom led by Jack Warden and a 2005 remake starring Billy Bob Thornton.³ Reviews of the 1978 sequel, including those in Daily Variety and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, found it better than Breaking Training but not as good as the original.⁸ The film has since been released on Blu-ray by Via Vision Entertainment in Australia as part of the Imprint line.⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026