The Winning Try
🎬 SBS · Netflix
⭐ MDL 8.5
📺 TV-MA
📋 Drama Overview
Everything you need to know before you hit play.
🏉 Sports Drama Pick
Joo Ga-ram (Yoon Kye-sang) was once the pride of Korean rugby — a player with enough talent to carry the national team past Japan and enough star power to make front pages. Then a doping scandal stripped everything: his career, his reputation, and his relationship with Bae I-ji (Lim Se-mi), the woman he left without explanation while the media labeled him a junkie. Three years later, Ga-ram returns as a contract coach for Hanyang High School’s rugby team — seven players, no budget, and a student body that already knows exactly who he used to be.
Yun Seong-jun (Kim Yo-han), the team’s hardworking captain, switched from soccer because he couldn’t bear feeling inferior to naturally talented players — and then Ga-ram shows up with exactly that kind of talent in ruins. As Vice Principal Seung Jong-man and PTA powerbroker Na Gyu-won work to eliminate the program entirely, Ga-ram must build something from almost nothing while managing a degenerative illness he’s kept hidden since his playing days. The Winning Try is a sports drama about the only kind of comeback that actually counts: not returning to what you were, but becoming someone worth trusting again.
12 / 12 ✅ Completed
⚡ Quick Verdict
One box. Everything you need to decide.
· One of 2025’s most crowd-pleasing sports dramas
▶ Official Trailer
🎭 Cast & Characters
The disgraced star, the ex-girlfriend, the envious captain, and eight more performances holding this underdog story together.
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📺 Episode Guide
Spoiler-light recaps — enough to remember where you left off, nothing that ruins the ride.
🏁 Ending Explained
Full spoilers ahead — everything that happens in the finale and what it all means.
Spoiler Warning — This section covers the full finale of The Winning Try. Stop here if you haven’t finished the series.
The Final Match. Hanyang High School’s rugby team wins the national title 22-19, a margin narrow enough to feel earned rather than gifted. The score matters less than what the team carries into that final match — twelve episodes of bureaucratic sabotage, coaching chaos, a captain’s jealousy, and a coach who refused surgery to stay on the sideline. Joo Ga-ram coaches the final with a body that has been fighting him for three years, watching players he rebuilt from seven reluctant teenagers into something that Myeongseong University scouts are now taking seriously. The win is real; the cost of getting here was real too.
Ga-ram’s Redemption — On His Own Terms. The question the drama has been building toward is not whether Ga-ram can coach an underdog team to a title — it’s whether he can become someone worth trusting again. The finale answers this not with a speech but with accumulation: the moment he claimed responsibility for Seong-jun’s steroids, the surgery he skipped, the presence he maintained when every sensible option was to step back. Ga-ram stays on as head coach after the championship, and the show is wise enough to frame it not as triumph but as continuation. He didn’t reclaim what he lost. He built something different with what remained.
Bae I-ji’s Arc Closed. I-ji’s resolution is the most satisfying secondary arc in the drama. She spends eleven episodes moving from “silent anger at a man who abandoned her” to “understanding that what looked like abandonment was a different kind of care” — a transition that could easily feel like the drama letting Ga-ram off the hook, but doesn’t, because I-ji makes the choice herself, on her own timeline. She becomes the official shooting coach, conquers the yips Nak-gyeon’s intimidation triggered, and ends the series married to Ga-ram. Not because the past has been erased, but because she decided who he actually is.
Yun Seong-jun Grows Up. The drama’s most quietly honest arc belongs to the captain who switched sports because he felt inferior to talent, then spent eleven episodes watching Mun Ung confirm every insecurity he carried. Seong-jun’s steroid episode isn’t written as a villain moment — it’s the logical conclusion of envy that never got examined, and the show treats it that way. His ending: Yonhee University admission and a long-distance relationship with Seo Woo-jin agreed to without ceremony. He doesn’t become Mun Ung’s equal in raw ability. He outgrows the comparison entirely, which is a harder and more meaningful thing to achieve.
The Team That Refused to Be Small. Mun Ung proves himself without the shadow of his father’s legend or his bully incident following him everywhere; Na Seol-hyeon wins gold with I-ji’s coaching; Oh Young-gwang’s police application and the rest of the squad’s individual arcs resolve in the background without requiring ceremony. The closing image is a team that aims for another championship — not because the drama needs a sequel hook, but because these are people who have learned that showing up is the point. The Winning Try ends not with certainty, but with direction: a coach who knows why he’s here, a team that knows what it’s capable of, and the particular satisfaction of watching people who had no business winning decide to win anyway.
✍️ KDramaWorlds Editor’s Take
Our honest read on why this drama is worth your time — and who it’s for.
💊 Illness Hidden in Plain Sight
🔄 Lovers Reunited
😤 Jealousy Arc Done Right
🎉 Feel-Good Finale
Yoon Kye-sang has been quietly excellent for two decades — the kind of actor who elevates material without demanding attention for doing it. The Winning Try finally gives him the kind of lead role that lets that quality do real work. Joo Ga-ram is a man who has spent three years learning to hold enormous weight without showing it, and Kye-sang plays that quiet dignity with enough physical specificity — the way Ga-ram moves when the illness is winning, the way he coaches from stillness rather than performance — that the character’s restraint reads as strength rather than absence. The Myasthenia Gravis reveal lands because he’s been carrying it in his posture for four episodes before the word is ever spoken aloud.
The high school rugby team is where the show could have gone generic — a collection of types rather than characters — and mostly doesn’t. Kim Yo-han’s Seong-jun is the drama’s best creation: a captain defined not by incompetence but by the specific terror of watching someone do effortlessly what you’ve spent years grinding toward. His steroid episode isn’t a dramatic crisis dropped in from another show; it’s the only place that arc was ever going. Compare this to the sports ensembles in Racket Boys — The Winning Try trades that drama’s warmth for something a little harder-edged, which is the right call for a story centered on a man who made a mistake that cost three years of his life.
The drama shares DNA with Twenty-Five Twenty-One in its interest in athletes who carry failure as an identity — but where that show was about youth running toward something, this one is about what happens when the running stops and you have to stand in front of what you became. The institutional corruption angle — Seung Jong-man and Na Gyu-won’s campaign against the rugby program — gives the comedy its teeth without tipping into melodrama. Twelve episodes at 80 minutes each is a real commitment; the show earns most of it.
Anyone who wants to see Yoon Kye-sang carrying a full lead role with the performance his career deserved
Viewers who want feel-good energy alongside genuine character work — the finale delivers both
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