Cleveland filmmaker’s “The Object of the Game” docuseries highlights lessons from legendary St. Ignatius football coach

Twenty years after graduating from St. Ignatius High School, filmmaker Matt Waldeck returned to the Ohio City campus. This time to film his former football coach Chuck “Chico” Kyle in his last season as coach of the Wildcats during 2022.

Considered one of the most accomplished coaches in high school football history, Kyle coached at St. Ignatius from 1983 to 2022 and had numerous former players advance to college or NFL careers. He was inducted into the National High School Football Hall of Fame in 2024.

The three-part docuseries, “The Object of the Game,” follows the legendary Coach Kyle and his young charges as they pursue one more state championship to add to Kyle’s trophycase – already filled with a  record 11 Ohio High School Athletic Association Division 1 state championships and four national titles. 

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As a run-up to this year’s Super Bowl, the docuseries will become available on Prime Video this Wednesday, Jan. 4.

“I loved my career, and there was this kid who was a safety for us named Matt Waldeck, and he said, ‘Hey, Coach, I want to do something about you,’” Kyle recalled. “I said, ‘Okay, this is the last year I’m coaching, and I’m going to coach these kids like I always do, so you just run your camera, and see what happens.’ It’s just a thrill to be a part of it.”

In March 2022, Waldeck started discussing the project with former teammate Ryan Franzinger who was then working as the defensive coordinator for Kyle. Initially, their concept was to embed with the team for the season and create an HBO  “Hard Knocks”-style sports documentary series but one that shadows a high school instead of a professional team.

“It became evident that Chico’s philosophy was really more the star of the story that he represented for those 40 years as head coach and then put down on paper with his book of the same title in 1997,” Waldeck said. “Then you have the véritédrama of the team and the gameplay during the season.”

Kyle, who considered his career a vocation, also coached track and taught English. He taught Shakespeare and Chaucer classes and was famously known for quoting inspirational passages as a pregame ritual such as the St. Crispin’s Day speech from the Bard’s play “Henry V.”

“For English, the students read all of these great novels, plays and poems and talk about them, but the kid is sitting at a desk and vicariously picturing whatever he is reading,” he said. “In sports, you’re out there. It’s physical, it’s mental, it’s spiritual, and those are things that are important to me.”

For Kyle, the football field represents an important classroom, where student athletes have to handle the successes, the disappointments and the work ethic required to play well.

“I told the seniors, whatever career you want to go into, please go ahead with confidence because success in every career out there is founded on somebody’s work ethic, and yes, you will learn that on a football field,” he said.

How the docuseries unfolds

Kyle was known as a coach who employed a positive approach toward instilling football skills, character and values into his players so they could become “winners” in life as well as on the field. Waldeck leveraged Kyle’s stellar reputation as a coach for the film. That enabled him to access VIP cast members who offered comment in the film, including prominent coaches and players such as Bill Belichick, Mike Tomlin, Tony Dungy and Tony Romo and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

“Chico’s book chapters are broken down into discipline, commitment, faith, pride, enthusiasm and so on,” Waldeck said. “Each one of these guys embodied those themes in a special way, and it’s a real testament to Chico’s legacy and his impact on the game at every level that all of them were compelled to participate, which was amazing for us.”

During a section of the film entitled “Faith,” which refers to the player’s belief in his abilities as much as a religious commitment, Waldeck captures St. Ignatius’ famous game against Cleveland Heights High School, a 2022 OHSAA Division I playoff football game that saw St. Ignatius trailing 42-14 at halftime. He inserts Romo, the quarterback holding the highest fourth-quarter rating in NFL history, to discuss the art of the comeback. 

“We intertwined this relevant theme of faith with an expert in Romo offering insight into how you do this, the practical Xs and Os and general football wisdom that will be useful to any coach, any athlete in any sport who doesn’t know anything about St. Ignatius, Chuck Kyle or Cleveland,” Waldeck said. “That was the key to making sure that the project would reach a broad audience and make the impact that it deserves to make.” 

Belichick, famed for coaching the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl championships, the most in NFL history, spoke  about preparation, strategy and time management. Waldeck interweaves Belichick’s insights into a section depicting what the filmmaker considers “a breakthrough moment of the St. Ignatius program,” when the Wildcats won the 1988 state championship game with a tenacious goal line stand as time ran out. 

“The docuseries is unique in that way, because the key element was ensuring that those guys were not just vanity appearances,” Waldeck said. “They’re relevant to the broader thesis of the film, but also the action of it. That’s a unique way to craft a sports doc that hasn’t been done before, where you’re taking people that aren’t directly related to a situation but interjecting them through theme.”

Super Bowl-winning coach Sean McVay of the Los Angeles Rams addresses his trademark characteristics, energy and enthusiasm, that complement Kyle’s style.

“McVay’s secret sauce is his approach to coaching excellence and leadership excellence, which couples well with Chico’s enthusiastic pregame speeches and approaching team building from a place of positivity,” Waldeck said. “Rather than coaches always breaking you down and telling you that you’re not good enough to try to motivate you, Chico and his staff focused on building the athlete and the kid up, so that obviously fits with McVay’s philosophy, as well.”

Originally, the project was going to be  an approximately 100-minute feature film, but as Waldeck got deeper into the action they filmed on the gridiron and the interviews, it became clear that the story required a three-part series about 152-minutes in length.

“It’s a big story, and I haven’t done that before. I haven’t done episodic nonfiction before, so that was a challenge but a new sort of format to tell a story in,” Waldeck said.

After graduating from St. Ignatius, Waldeck went on to play varsity football for Pitzer College near Los Angeles, California, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in World Literature and Media Studies in 2006. While pursuing his career in the Los Angeles film industry for 10 years, Waldeck met Cleveland producer and filmmaker Tyler Davidson. He returned to Cleveland in 2012 when Davidson hired him as a creative executive at his Low Spark Films company. 

In 2014, Waldeck co-founded Zodiac Features and went on to produce the 2019 horror film “I See You” starring Helen Hunt and direct the documentary “Lovely Jackson” about Clevelander Ricky Jackson who was exonerated after serving 39 years in prison. The latter film is available for free on Prime until April 2026.  

Cleveland Browns NFL Hall of Famer’s role

For “The Object of the Game,” Waldeck and crew traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, to film Cleveland Browns Hall of Fame  offensive lineman Joe Thomas. The interviews took place in several locations, including historic Camp Randall, once a Union Army training camp during the Civil War. Today, it is the location of the home stadium for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Badgers football team, where Thomas played his collegiate football. Opened in 1917, it is the oldest stadium in the Big Ten.

In the film, Thomas discusses the importance of setting daily goals and incorporating them as a vital component of fueling a strong work ethic.

“If you wake up and every day you have that goal of what you want to accomplish, pretty soon those long-term goals that you have seem more achievable because you’re hitting all of these little goals and milestones along the way,” Thomas said. “You’re starting to feel the joy of what it feels like to work hard for something and then achieve your goals. That was one of the things I took away from the game of football, and every day I came in with a goal that I wanted to accomplish at practice.”

Of Thomas’s contribution to “The Object of the Game,” Kyle said, “I really appreciated that Joe did this for us, and when he talks about setting that goal every day, every human being can hear that. “Joe hit it right on the button, and that’s a good message for young kids and everybody.”

“The docuseries presents a heartfelt story and all the impact that Coach Kyle has made in his community and the game of football,” Thomas said. “But the big takeaway for people is they’re going to see the traits that make a great football team and a great human being, the idea of sacrificing oneself for team goals and having this vision that’s bigger than your own little piece of the pie, the toughness that it takes to have success in football, and those life lessons that you could take into any walk of life.” 

Coach Kyle’s concerns about his beloved game 

Kyle knows football faces several challenges in the future, between growing concerns among parents and players about the potential neurological damages of concussions. In a time where even high school athletes are being paid NIL (name, image, likeness) money, coaches at the high school and college levels are seeing the impacts on amateur athletics.

Although he does not criticize athletes for earning money to help their families, he knows it’s tarnishing the life lessons he tried to inculcate in his players. In “The Object of the Game,” retired University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban discusses his objections to NIL money and that it was the reason he retired.  

“There’s more to this game than just your pocketbook so to open that door when kids are just learning about life, I hope we are doing the right thing there,” Kyle concluded. “Matt incorporates an element in his documentary saying, ‘Hey, please think this over and realize that even though you’re not going to be a pro football player, there is a huge value to this game in your life besides any monetary reward” 

Kyle believes there will be a significant audience for his former player’s film because he knows that most people who played the game of football in school did not go on to professional careers. 

“There are way more people that played youth football and high school football and it was a great experience for them and wasn’t a waste of time but helped them in their life,” he said. “So, yes a lot of people played high school football and youth football that can relate to what they will see in the documentary. ”