In 1965, the coach of the high school girl basketball team Don Haskins is invited by the Texas Western Miners to be their coach. Despite the lack of budget, Haskins sees the chance to dispute the NCAA and moves with his wife and children to the college dormitory.

The story goes that the author of 'Glory,', was walking across Boston Common one day when he noticed something about a Civil War memorial that he had never noticed before. Some of the soldiers in it were black. Although the American Civil War is often referred to as the war to free the slaves, it had never occurred to Jarre - or, apparently, to very many others - that blacks themselves fought in the war. The inspiration for 'Glory' came to Jarre as he stood looking at the monument.It tells the story of the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, made up of black soldiers - some Northern freemen, some escaped slaves - and led by whites, including Robert Gould Shaw, the son of Boston abolitionists. Although it was widely believed at the time that blacks would not make good soldiers and would not submit to discipline under fire, the 54th figured in one of the bloodiest actions of the war, an uphill attack across muddy terrain against a Confederate fort in Charleston, S.C.

The attack was almost suicidal, particularly given the battlefield strategies of the day, which involved disciplining troops to keep on marching into withering fire. The 54th suffered a bloodbath. But its members remained disciplined soldiers to the end, and their performance on that day - July 18, 1863 - encouraged the North to recruit other blacks to its ranks, 180,000 in all, and may have been decisive in turning the tide of the war.