David Boreanaz

Every time March Madness rolls around, the curious call Immaculata University in Chester County:

Tell me about the Mighty Macs - the women’s basketball squad from a tiny Catholic women’s college in the suburbs, coached by a woman barely older than her players, that won three national championships in the early 1970s.

Tell me about that coach - Cathy Rush.

"We’ve all been saying for years this would make a great movie," said Marie Moughan, who handles public relations at the school.

"What a concept," Rush herself said. "A League of Their Own, Hoosiers and Sister Act, all rolled into one."

And so Our Lady of Victory - starring Carla Gugino as the plucky coach at the dawn of the women’s movement - is in the works.

The 30-day shoot, which began shortly before Memorial Day, is playing out across Philadelphia’s western suburbs "because of the charm," said director/screenwriter Tim Chambers, who made his own call to Moughan seven years ago.

The Newtown Square-raised Chambers, 44, who was Pennsylvania’s film commissioner for two years under Gov. Ridge, helped produce the 2004 film Miracle, based on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team.

Chambers needed money to make Our Lady of Victory, and he credits Pat Croce with leading the drive to raise $6.5 million, all in the Philadelphia area. Chambers and Croce hope to sell the finished product to a distributor to place it in theaters and on DVD.

"There’s an entrepreneurial spirit here," said Chambers. "We’re willing to take more risk."

Even with a modest budget (by Hollywood standards), the filmmakers are making every effort to keep their period piece realistic. Eighty percent of the film is shot indoors. Producer Whitney Springer said he offered a 25,000-square-foot sound stage in California. "Free," he said. "No unions. They didn’t want it. They insisted it had to be done here. Authenticity."

Actor-players walk the set in gray sweats, non-designer T-shirts, Chuck Taylor Converse sneaks and orange lipstick. Gugino praises the work of Teresa Binder-Westby, the costume designer. "She found one woman who had tons of plaid - and she was my size," Gugino said.

When the company set up last month inside a rowhouse on East Gay Street in West Chester, it was 1972 all over again: Love beads hung from a doorway. A bentwood rocker sat in the living room. My Name Is Barbra, Two was queued up on a Zenith Stereophonic record player.

It was the apartment shared by Rush and her then-husband, Ed, an NBA referee. He is played by David Boreanaz.

The Rushes’ relationship is a crucial part of the plot. "You have a 23-year-old woman married to an NBA referee - a celebrity," said Chambers. "She’s at a point in her life where she’s asking herself, ’Do I want to coach or start a family?’ "

Chambers enlisted WIP talk-show host/sportswriter Anthony Gargano to interview the principals. "We spent many a night on his sofa in our sweats," said Gargano, who gets the "story by" credit.

"The more time we spent with Cathy, the more we realized this was a story about equality of dreams," Chambers said.

"Look at the stakes," Chambers said. "This was the first time women were playing for something. In her pregame speech, she’s empowering them: ’It’s OK to go for the prize.’ The thread that holds these women together is the journey."

The Mighty Macs racked up a 35-game winning streak while going 74-4 from 1972 to 1974.

Chambers said one studio had considered buying his script outright - only to rewrite it "like Sister Act." He decided to press on by himself.

Like every writer, Chambers took liberties. The screenplay had to satisfy not only Ed and Cathy Rush - who sold their rights - but the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

"When I first talked to Cathy [Rush] about it, she asked, ’Do we win in the end?’ " said Moughan. "But there’s a whole lot of truth to it. The essence is right. It honors all of us."

"He is a dynamic, enthusiastic, positive, upbeat person - and that Catholic background - one of 12 children," Cathy Rush said of Chambers. "And he’s an athletic guy as well." Chambers was a football standout at Penn.

For 37 years, Rush has run a series of girls sports camps. She’s long divorced from Ed. Their two boys are now 34 and 33, and she’s a grandmother of two.

Boreanaz, whose resume includes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Bones, said his agency showed him the script, in which he’d play Ed Rush. Then Boreanaz - son of WPVI-TV weathercaster Dave Roberts - realized that this was the same Ed Rush who used to drive him to games when he was at Malvern Prep.

Chambers said he needed a "strong, sassy, attractive woman to capture the zeitgeist of a ’70s feminist."

An agent brought him Gugino. "I’m familiar with her work, [and she] is versatile," said Chambers. "She was equally good in Spy Kids, Entourage and on Broadway. I saw her in a play [the revival of Suddenly Last Summer with Blythe Danner], and I knew she was Cathy Rush."

Gugino, who professes to be athletic but not an athlete, said she was drawn to the screenplay’s "equality of dreams" theme. "Women need more young female role models," she said.

Philadelphia’s Heery Casting put out a casting call in the spring, and hundreds of young women arrived at Immaculata, ready to dribble. The Greater Philadelphia Film Office helped filmmakers in assorted ways, including location scouting and navigating red tape.

Veteran actress Ellen Burstyn stars as the mother superior who needs to be sold on the notion of girls in shorts. (They wore skirts early on.) Marley Shelton (Dr. Dakota Block in Grindhouse) plays Sister Sunday, Cathy Rush’s gal Friday. Malachy McCourt, the veteran character actor who shows up at Christmas time on the soap All My Children as Pine Valley’s priest, was cast just this week as the monsignor.

Many former Macs have cameo roles, including Rush (playing the bank teller who cashes the coach’s first paycheck of $19.50). Two daughters of Denise Conway (now Crawford), a member of all three national championship teams and captain of the 1974 team, show up on court.

Chuck Cohen, who helped set up the sports action on such films as Varsity Blues and The Waterboy, will film 10 basketball games next week at Malvern Prep, the Hill School, Cheyney University and an armory in West Chester.

Chambers said the Mighty Macs’ glory days came in the last years before passage of Title IX - which improved funding for women’s college sports and created powerhouse teams from big schools. Immaculata went coed in fall 2005.

"The Mighty Macs?" he said. "This will never happen again."