by Mike Lupica
He handed her one. She stepped back a few paces, making the throw about a yard longer. But that was so she could step into her throw.
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, smiling to herself.
I got this.
Even though it was a regulation ball, it felt good in her hand. She and her dad always used a regulation ball in the backyard, and she loved the feel of the laces beneath her fingers.
Eye on the hole, she stepped into the throw.
Fired a perfect spiral right through it.
If it had been a basketball shot, the announcers would have said it hit nothin’ but net.
The guy bent at the waist, hands on his knees. “Are you kidding?”
“My football girl,” Jack Carlisle said to him, proudly slapping a hand onto Alex’s shoulder.
Alex had shocked even herself. She hadn’t expected the ball to go through, but it had. And maybe she could even do it again. Turning to the man in the booth, she put out her hand and said, “Another ball, please.”
“You already won the prize,” he said, incredulous.
“Yeah, but my dad paid for three throws,” she said. “Gotta get our money’s worth.”
He handed her another ball, shaking his head. She took an extra step back this time.
The ball whistled through the hole again.
“Show-off,” her dad said.
“How old are you?” the guy asked.
“Twelve,” Alex replied.
“No way.”
“Way,” she said.
She put out her hand once more, and he tossed her the last ball. She fired another spiral right through the opening.
“Money,” Jack Carlisle said.
“Not for me today,” the man said in disappointment. He pointed toward the stuffed animals. “Which one do you want?”
Alex pointed to Simba. The guy used a grabbing stick to lower Simba off the wall of prizes and held it out to Alex. She received it as if he were handing her the Super Bowl trophy.
“You’ve got some arm for a girl,” the young man said.
“I’ve got some arm, period,” she said.
When they got home that night, Alex told her dad what she’d been keeping inside all summer: she wanted to try out for the football team at Orville Middle.
2
The walls of Alex’s room were covered in Steelers posters, and the shelves were lined with soccer and softball trophies and medals. Simba was propped up next to Alex on her bed, taking up about half the mattress and forcing her to relocate some of her smaller stuffed animals to her desk chair.
Alex was prepared for the conversation she and her dad were about to have. She knew trying out for the football team would come with questions and concerns. They’d talked a little about it over dinner, but they continued it here, in her room, surrounded by the greatest football team ever to exist.
It was just the two of them, as always. Alex’s mom was living in San Francisco. But she and her mom had a good relationship, even long distance. Her mom now had a four-year-old son with her new husband, Richard.
She got the boy, Alex had thought more than once.
Alex had expected her dad to try to talk her out of it. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t given his permission yet, either.
“You know why I felt so good today making those throws at the fair?” she said. “Because for a few minutes, I felt like I was in the game.”
Her dad was sitting at the end of her bed, facing her.
“I always knew how well you could throw,” he said.
“For a girl?” Alex said with a smirk.
“You know me better than that,” he said. “And no one knows better than I do how football is your thing.”
“But I don’t just want it to be a thing when I’m sitting with you at Heinz Field, Dad,” she said. “Or next to you on the couch.”
“A lot of people love football,” he said. “And hardly any of them ever suit up and play.”
“Is this about how I might get hurt?”
“Hey,” he said. “I know you can get hurt playing any sport. You get tackled in soccer, too, and the only padding you wear is below your knees.”
“I hate when they get tackled in the World Cup and beg for calls,” Alex said. “I never did that.”
“My girl,” he said.
He called her that a lot, but this time it made Alex think of something.
“We wouldn’t even still be talking about this if I were a boy,” she said.
“Hey, you know that’s not true,” he said. “I have lots of friends who don’t want their sons to play. They’ve all read the news that’s come out about concussions and head injuries and all the rest of it.”
“But most of those boys will get to play,” Alex said. “And there’s nothing in the rules that says I can’t, if I’m good enough.”
“You’re right about that,” he said. “I checked online while you were setting up for dinner. The announcement on the school website said that the tryouts are open to anybody in the seventh grade.” He grinned at her, the fun in his eyes this time. “Which would include a girl, even if she is most definitely not just anybody.”
“So I can go for it?” Alex said.
Jack Carlisle breathed a deep sigh. “You can go for it, kiddo.”
Alex tackled her dad with a hug, nearly knocking the wind out of him.
“Whoa there—save that energy for the field!” he said.
“The tryouts are next week, though,” Alex said, a frown shadowing her face. “The same nights as soccer tryouts.”
“Your soccer coach isn’t going to be happy,” her dad said.
“She’s probably not going to be the only one.”
Alex’s dad stood up and kissed the top of her head before walking toward the bedroom door. He could see how excited and happy she was.
“I love you,” Alex said.
“Always nice to hear,” he said. “But what did I do in particular?”
“You didn’t say no.”
“You’re the one who’s going to be putting herself out there,” he said. “How could I possibly say no to something I’ve been telling you to do your whole life?”
“You think Mom will approve?”
He paused in the doorway. “You don’t need her approval,” he said. Not in a rude way, just as a matter of fact. “But, yeah, I think she will. You know how big she is on chasing after what you want.”
They both knew what he meant. Liza Carlisle—now Dr. Liza Borelli—had wanted to be a doctor more than anything. But she didn’t go to med school after college. Instead, she followed her heart and married Alex’s dad, and they had Alex a few years later. Suddenly, her dreams of becoming a surgeon began drifting further away from reality. In the end, she had to choose: sacrificing the dream for the family or the family for the dream.
At thirty, she did eventually attend med school, and she and Alex’s dad got a divorce. Alex had been four. She didn’t understand why her mom was leaving her, no matter how many times either parent tried to explain it. All Alex thought at the time was that her mom didn’t want her.
“Someday you’ll understand,” her mom had said to Alex a few years back.
“You mean how selfish you are?” Alex had replied.
Her dad always said she was old, even when she was young.
“You will always be a big part of my life,” her mom said. “But I want more out of my own life than I have, and if I don’t do this now, I never will.”
Some of Alex’s earliest memories were of the day her mother left. She could only remember small things. The suitcases in the front hall. The car waiting to take her mother to the airport. How she couldn’t stop crying.
“Dreams and choices are complicated,” her mom had said. “Sometimes more complicated for women than men. Wh
en you’re older, you will understand.”
And, over time, Alex did. She understood why her mom had chosen to leave, and why it had to happen when it did.
Mostly she understood the part about the complicated nature of dreams.
And choices.
Her mom had made a big one, leaving Alex. Deciding to pursue the career rather than care for her only child. Running away from her obligations, as Alex saw it. And maybe, to an extent, she still felt that way. The feeling of being rejected. It was why, even now, she had difficulty making friends. Really close friends. She had spent a lot of her life being afraid to put herself out there. She wasn’t an outcast, exactly. But sometimes she just felt safer being part of the crowd, having a lot of good friends instead of one or two really close ones.
That way she didn’t have to risk getting hurt.
But somehow going out for football felt different. Or maybe it was just a different Alex. Like they said on those TV commercials: a new and improved Alex Carlisle.
Even though she hadn’t raised the subject with her dad until today, or with any of her friends yet, she had been thinking about trying out for football all summer. And the more she thought about it, the less afraid she became.
She was going for it. Just like her mom. It made her a little proud. Made her feel brave.
Opening up her laptop on her bed, she typed in the school’s website and reread the page about tryouts. They’d be spread out over four nights and include skill training, sprints, and a mile run, plus an obstacle course. Alex had never gone through anything this intensive for softball or soccer. But if there was one thing she knew, it was that she could run all day without getting tired.
And there was one other big thing:
She knew she could throw a football as well as anyone her age in Orville, Pennsylvania.
Getting up to look in her closet now, she picked her football off the floor and put her fingers over the laces. The laces felt as good as they had at the fair.
Seeing her hand on the ball brought a smile to her face.
No way the football cared whether a boy or girl was throwing it, she thought.
The door to her room was closed. She was alone with the ball and all her big ideas about making the team.
“Let’s do this,” she said softly to herself. “Let’s do this.”
Then she stood tall, left hand out in front of her, the ball set over her right shoulder, as if standing in the pocket.
3
Alex’s dad was late getting home from the office on Friday, the night of the football tryouts meeting. The women’s intramural basketball league had reserved the middle school gym for that night, so their meeting would take place at Orville High. Alex didn’t mind. She liked getting a preview of the hallways she’d be walking through in just a few years. Their neighbor, Kelly, who looked after Alex during the week, offered to drop her off at the high school.
But Alex wanted her dad with her. Not because she was feeling anxious. Just in case she started to.
“This feels a little like my first day of school,” Alex said in the car.
“You got this,” he said. “And I’ve got you. Remember that.”
The parents were seated in bleachers on both sides of the gym. There was a long table set up underneath the scoreboard. As Alex and her dad entered, some of the teachers from Orville Middle were handing out sign-up forms.
One of them was Mr. Maybin, who’d taught Alex sixth-grade math.
“Hey you,” he said to Alex. “What are you doing here?”
“Signing up,” Alex said.
“This is for football,” Mr. Maybin said, as if Alex had stumbled into the wrong gym.
“I know,” Alex said, feeling confident.
“Well, okay then!” he said, a little awkwardly, handing her a form. “Make sure to get a parent or guardian’s signature before submitting.”
Alex smiled and took the form. “Thanks, Mr. M.”
She knew she was going to be the only girl on the gym floor that night. But if she was being honest, she’d known that well before leaving home. Knew from the moment she’d decided to try out. But now she was here. No turning back. There were seventh-grade boys seated on both sides of the basketball court, with a wide lane cutting between. Alex walked up that lane now, feeling every eye in the gym on her. Some of them even belonged to the parents up in the bleachers with her dad. She heard some giggles, too. And some whispers. But then relief washed over her when she spotted a familiar face in the crowd—tan, freckled cheeks, a messy crop of chestnut brown curls, skinny legs crossed in front of him. She’d gone to school with Gabe Hildreth since kindergarten, and they shared all the same classes. Over the years, they’d grown to be pretty good friends. Gabe had been a star wide receiver on the sixth-grade team at Orville Middle.
Alex walked over to where he was sitting, and he made some room. She sat down next to him.
Now Gabe was whispering.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“What you’re doing here,” she whispered back. “Trying out for football.”
The coach of this year’s seventh-grade team was a man named Ed Mencken, a phys ed teacher at the high school who Alex knew had played football with her dad when they went to Orville High. Mr. Mencken had been a tight end, according to Alex’s dad. Alex spotted him now up near the table and thought he looked to be in good enough shape to go out for a pass right now.
But he wasn’t going out for any passes at the moment. He was walking down the aisle between his prospective players, straight in Alex’s direction.
“Excuse me, young lady,” he said.
“Yes, sir?” she said.
He was standing over her now.
“Are you in the right place?” Mr. Mencken asked, totally serious.
“Yes, sir,” Alex said. But the way he said it made her feel a little unsure herself.
If everybody in the gym hadn’t been staring at her before, they were now. Mr. Mencken had a voice as big as himself.
“This meeting is about football tryouts,” he said, as if Alex were a confused child lost in the woods.
Alex’s dad was in the front row of the bleachers, to her right. He could hear what Mr. Mencken had said. Alex was pretty sure the whole gym heard. Her dad stood now, and Alex held her breath, worried he might make this moment even more awkward for her than it already was.
“She’s in the right place, Ed,” he said.
Mr. Mencken turned to see where the voice was coming from. Then he saw who it belonged to.
“Your daughter?” he said to Jack Carlisle.
Alex’s dad gave a quick nod. “Yes, sir.”
Mr. Mencken looked as if he wanted to say something more but decided against it. He simply walked back to the table, picked up the microphone (even though Alex couldn’t imagine why he needed one), and started talking about this year’s team.
He said that of all the boys in the gym, twenty-four of them would make the team. That’s how he said it: boys. As if he’d forgotten Alex was there. Or maybe he was ignoring her. He said the Owls would play an eight-game schedule against other middle schools in their area, and at the end of the season there would be a championship game between the two teams with the best records. The game would be played the Saturday before Thanksgiving.
Then he described what they should expect over the four nights of tryouts.
“From now on, I’ll be Coach Mencken,” he said. “Even though we haven’t picked the team yet, the season starts Monday night. This will be a real training camp, not some summer camp. You boys—” This time he managed to stop himself. “You all are going to work harder over the next few days than you’ve ever worked on anything in your lives.”
He smiled, but didn’t look all that happy to Alex.
“And you’re going to love it,” he said with a sm
irk.
He walked back up to the table and turned around, facing everybody in the gym at once.
“And if you’re not willing to put in the work to be the best football player you can be, then don’t bother filling out that form in your hand,” he said. “Because this isn’t the team for you and I’m not the coach for you.”
From somewhere behind Alex she heard someone say, “I heard this guy was tough.”
If Mr. Mencken heard, he didn’t let on.
“Long story short?” he said. “I’m a football guy. And I want football guys playing for me.”
Alex swore he was looking at her again as he said that. Or maybe she’d just imagined it.
I’m as much a football guy as anybody in the gym, she thought.
Coach Mencken put down the microphone. The meeting was over. But a lot of the boys from her school were still staring daggers at Alex.
“You never said anything about wanting to play football,” Gabe said when they were standing. The parents were up and chatting now, some asking Coach Mencken questions about the team. The other seventh graders were milling about, catching up on their summers.
“I didn’t make up my mind to try out until the last couple of days,” she said, then shrugged. “And then I figured if I told you, you’d only try to talk me out of it. So I decided to surprise you . . . and I guess everybody else.”
He blew out some air. But he was smiling.
“Well,” he said, “mission accomplished on that.”
“Mr. Mencken didn’t seem too happy to see me,” Alex said.
“From what I hear,” Gabe said, “the only thing that makes him happy is winning football games.”
“Maybe he’ll like the idea of a girl on his team better if I show him I can do that,” she said, then paused. “How do you feel about all this?”
She didn’t clarify, but knew Gabe understood what she meant. How did he feel about her trying out for the team?