by Melissa King
I watched the two teams practice for a while and felt nervous, thinking about that audience of humorless parents facing another season sitting in bleachers and making dreary small talk. A jittery need to urinate was coming on, like I was about to give a presentation. I had to coach myself, silently repeating various twelve-step-esque codas.
I have a lot to offer these girls.
The parents will support me and appreciate my efforts.
Screw them. I’m the coach, and they can all kiss my ass.
Finally, it was time for practice. I stood under one of the hoops, fiddling with my notebook, trying to have a commanding presence, and three girls approached and stood in front of me all in a row like Siamese triplets, giggling and elbowing each other.
Emily was shy, with crooked teeth and a smile that overtook her face when you spoke to her. She was joined at the shoulder to Felicia, a dainty black girl, bright and enthusiastic, with a long, bushy ponytail that hung down her back. Rounding out this preliminary trio was surly Allison, shrugging or nodding when you asked her a question, her eyes perpetually at half-mast as if they were guarding an entrance.
A slump-shouldered tomboy arrived with her father. He quickly introduced her, making sure she was at the right place, and then he turned her over to me. “Beth!” he barked good-humoredly, “this is your coach! Listen to her! I’m going to sit up in the stands and do some work!”
She was loose, relaxed and at home in the world, and she joined the group easily.
I recognized the person who had to be Tonya. Her stepmom had told me over the phone that the girl was a GLA, tall, like her mom, who the stepmom wasn’t, and that the dad was not allowed to coach Tonya’s teams because he was “too serious.” The stepmom and Tonya’s dad made their way to the top of the bleachers carrying an infant in a car seat, sitting out of chatting range from everyone else. They wore interesting hats and black leather coats and stood out stylishly among all the rumpled parents in the gym.
And then there was Amanda. Little bitty Amanda, not even half the size of Tonya.
I memorized their names and told them mine. I said our goal was to have fun this season, that we were going to play hard and be serious, but we were gonna have fun, too. I told them to remember what I’d said, because I was going to ask them again at the end of practice, so be sure to remember our goal, which was, I reminded them, to have fun.
We started out with some drills from Baffled. I figured that’s what the parents would want to see, lots of snappy drills, but I would have preferred to minimize the standing in line, the boredom, and all the remembering where to go on the floor and who to throw it to.
I wanted to talk to the girls about relaxing, about being in the moment and thinking on their feet, about not being married to outcomes, about that stuff we never got to at Never Too Late, but the thought of six sets of parents calling the Boys and Girls Club the next day stood between me and a Zen diatribe, so we just stuck to dribbling and passing.
I went through the basics of ball handling, especially about not looking down at the ball. We dribbled backwards, we dribbled forwards, we dribbled with our left hand and our right, we kept our eyes up. Then we worked on passing, chest and bounce. I put them in pairs and had them pass the ball back and forth, watching Allison, the surly one, throw unnecessarily hard to her giggling partner. We worked on lay-ups and shot around a little, and then I decided to talk to them about how to play defense. I asked them if they knew where to look, and they shouted, “The ball!” “Their eyes!” “Their feet!” I told them what I’d told Rolando back at Wicker Park: look at the belly, because they can’t fake you out with their belly.
Except for shooting, we’d pretty much covered the game of basketball. I looked at my watch and became traumatized to see that only twenty-five minutes had gone by, and we were out of drills. I sent them out for a drink and frantically thought up a plan for the second half of practice.
When they got back, we played some one-on-one. Ten minutes went by. I sent them out for another drink, which took up another thirty seconds, and then we sat down to talk about our team name.
We were listed as team number 65 at the Boys and Girls Club, and I joked that the name seemed to lack a certain pizzazz. My “humor” provoked stone-faced looks from every girl except Beth, the tomboy, who started laughing and saying, “Number sixty-five! Yeah! Team Sixty-Five, the Sixty-Fives!”
It was the first of many times I was to witness a phenomenon that was sure to bring practice to a halt: Beth talking.
“Go, Sixty-Fives, go! Last year, there was this team, they were called the Ravens, and they were all, like, fashionable, and they had these uniforms with all this stuff all over them and they thought they were so, like, hot, with their warm-up drills and everything, but they cheated, because the refs, like, called everything for them and they always won.”
“Really?!” I said, and lined them up by height for some three-on-three. As they played, I was proud to see they were all smiles, having fun, working hard. I asked them once if they needed a break, and they all said no, they wanted to keep playing.
When our time was up, I brought them all back in to huddle and told them they’d done well, good job. Then I asked them what our goal was for the season.
“Play good defense!”
“Win games!”
“Have fun!”
It was Beth who had listened.
I asked them if we’d met our goal for the day, and they all nodded and said yes, except Tonya, who shrugged and held up a thumb and finger by way of saying maybe a little bit.
Standing in the warm glow of the team’s good humor, I wanted to give Tonya’s ponytail a good, hard yank.
We broke for the night, and as I made my way across the floor, the parents swarmed, introducing themselves and asking questions. As I spoke to one, the others listened a little too hard, looking at me like I was a magician and they were waiting for a trick, and they’d seen lots of tricks before.
It was raining. Beth’s dad said, “Okay, Beth, focus! Let’s run to the car!” and the two of them took off.
Tonya’s stepmom approached me, lugging the carrier. The baby was awake, squirming happily under a blanket. I asked her how old the child was, and the stepmom’s countenance softened a shade as she told me twelve weeks. I asked if he’d had colic. “Oh no,” she said, “I don’t want him to get none of that stuff; that’s why I’ve got him bundled up like this.”
Even I knew colic wasn’t something you caught like a cold. I looked at the peaceful little boy and wondered briefly about the benefit of not overthinking things, but driving home, a nagging discomfort lingered. Next time, more drills.
Coach Danner, that prince, used to toughen us up at the beginning of a season by putting us in two lines, rolling a ball down the center of the floor, and having us run and dive for it. More often than not, the two girls would reach the ball at the same time and fight for it like gamecocks. We pulled each other’s hair, clothes even came off a few times, and for days we’d be proud of our bruises, as if, like Allison’s firebomb passes, they made us good players.
Early season included a weigh-in. One year, Coach put poor fat Nicole Burns on the scale and made her cry by calling out her weight in front of the boys’ coaches and laughing. The rest of us had bruises that didn’t make us better at basketball, but at least they went away.
Six players showed up for the next practice, along with Felicia’s mother, Patty, who was dressed out in sweats. She said she’d like to help us, if that was okay, and I said sure it was.
This time I was armed with enough Baffled drills to get through two practices. We started with the slide drill, an old defensive standard where one girl faces the rest of the group and leads them in sideways footwork. Then the leader yells “Switch!” and everyone slides the other way. I showed them how to do the drill, put one of the girls in front as leader, and then moved to the back. As we began, I watched Patty among the group, looking like some college starter. I asked her
to get up there, please Patty, and show ’em how it’s done, and she did; she jumped up and showed them a little perfection, smiling, conscious as a cheerleader of the message in her movements, her knees bent, feet moving, fingers telling her imaginary man, Come on, come on, just try and drive by me.
I thought of Steve, the coach at Never Too Late, as I found myself saying, “Now that’s what defense looks like!”
Then, standing behind all the girls and watching them watch Patty, I saw something. Every cheesy sports movie has the kid with the bad attitude, the one with talent sure to be wasted unless some dedicated coach knocks that chip off and gains his trust and turns him into a team player. It was a cliché, but nonetheless, my bad attitude player was emerging, called on to play her role as surely as the alpha male or the scapegoat in a wolf pack.
Of course it was Tonya lazily going back and forth, legs straight, looking around like she was bored, while the rest of us gladly hopped a ride on Patty’s happy train.
I shouted, “Let’s see you move, Tonya!” and she started trying, but only for a few minutes before lazing it up again. In the stands, her parents glowered at nothing in particular, the stepmom in her belted leather jacket, the dad in his skullcap. They looked like some terminally pissed-off members of the mod squad with an infant carrier.
When we finished the drill, I had the girls gather around, and I felt hyper-aware of little pockets of feeling all over the gym. Tonya’s bored-looking, wandering eyes felt one way. Patty’s affirming nods felt another way. In between them was me, the one in charge of creating a reality.
Patty had a way of appearing when we needed her and leaving the floor to me when it was time. She was prone to giving her daughter quick, spontaneous hugs on the court, but once, when Felicia hurt herself and started to cry, Patty wouldn’t hug her or even look at her, telling her to shake it off, deal with it.
I had enough drills to make it through practice, but I was still a little relieved when the custodian who monitored the gym got my attention and pointed at his watch. As I headed for the exit, Beth sprinted over to me, shoved a homemade Christmas card into my hand without saying a word, and took off running after her mother. Then I drove home.
The next practice found our town in the middle of a flu epidemic. Only two players made it: Brittany, whom I was meeting for the first time, and Tonya.
Brittany was skinny as a lizard, and very pretty. She was early, and she immediately asked me if there was a girl from her school named Tonya Greer on our team. When I said yes, she yelled, “I hate that kid! She is such a brat! She won’t listen to you, you know, she never listens to anybody. She has to go out in the hall all the time.”
“She didn’t seem so bad to me,” I lied.
I talked to Brittany’s mother as she worked to keep the reins on Brittany’s second-grade brother, Gordon, and their two-year-old baby sister. The mom apologized for missing the first two practices and cataloged all the running around she’d had to do that day for the kids’ events. It was a lot, the mother said, with a two-year-old and living thirty minutes away.
“My husband tells me I’m crazy to let them do all this stuff,” she said. “But I don’t want it to be like it was for me growing up, with the way my dad was. He took me out of basketball because I complained once, and he took me out of gymnastics because my sister was better than I was.”
A stray ball bounced over and hit the two-year-old in the back of the head, nearly knocking her down. The child wailed as I rejoined Brittany out on the court. Tonya arrived, and Brittany gave her a caustic look to let her know how bad it was to see her.
Since we only had two, the coach of the team that had been practicing before us asked us to play with his third-grade girls. “It’ll be chaos, no matter what,” the coach laughed. Tonya and Brittany were put on teams, along with Brittany’s brother Gordon, to even out the sides.
Tonya scored lots of points against the younger, much shorter girls, and with every bucket, she stuck two V for Victory fingers in the air in an unjustified show of cockiness. I watched Brittany closely, since I’d never seen her play before, trying to determine what areas she would need work in, but every aspect of her game appeared equally abysmal as she moved up and down the court, regal and confident and entirely unskilled.
Finally a woman with a distinctly irritated-wife demeanor came over and had a word with the other coach. He shouted, “This is the last time down, girls!”
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with Brittany and Tonya, two girls of drastically different height and experience who couldn’t stand the sight of each other, so I grabbed up Gordon and put him on my team for some two-on-two. Brittany made it clear she would have liked to see her brother join Tonya in disappearing.
As we played, a dramatic change in demeanor came over Gordon. After his competent performance in the five-on-five game, he was now unable to remain upright. He toppled on every play, rolling around on the floor massaging his ankles, clutching his wrists, or cupping his nose in a show of athletic agony. I knew he wasn’t hurt, but I didn’t know what to do with him short of calling for a stretcher, so I suggested maybe he’d like to sit out for a while.
Brittany screamed across the gym, “Mom! Gordon’s being a big baby!”
Their mom walked across the court to check on her son, the still-sniffling toddler hanging on her neck.
“Maybe he’s too tired, and that’s why he keeps getting hurt,” she said, leading him back to the bleachers and quickly rolling her eyes over Brittany’s way as if to agree, yes, he’s being a big baby, but let’s try and be nice. Gordon limped over to the bleachers, no doubt hearing the roar of an imaginary crowd recognizing his bravery.
Brittany, herself not quite over the flu, kept sprinting without warning to the bathroom, leaving me on the court with Tonya, who walked over and talked to her dad during these many breaks. I had no control over anything that was happening.
After Brittany returned from a particularly long absence, Gordon ran back on the court, ready to play through his injuries. It was him and me against the girls, who did everything they could to avoid passing the ball to each other, a unique challenge to infuse into a game of two-on-two. To encourage a pass, I left Tonya wide open in the lane, but Brittany dribbled and dribbled and dribbled. Since she couldn’t get by Gordon and wouldn’t pass, her only choice was to move backwards, and the two of them began to move away from us. I started hollering at Brittany to pass the ball and come on back, but Gordon was sticking his sister big-time, and she dribbled past the half-court and made it to the out-of-bounds line on the other side. Then she took off for the other half of the gym.
Tonya looked at me and said, “What the . . . ?”
I sighed and said, “I know, I know, I’ll get them back down here.” To be frank, I was getting pretty tired of this particular practice, but I wasn’t going to quit early, especially after hearing all the effort Brittany’s mom went to just to get her there.
I’d learned in my earlier practices to keep an eye on the custodian, who sat in a folding chair off by himself and watched the court. Every few minutes he’d yawn and say, “Lord, I’m tired!” but he always perked up when it was time to go home.
Sometimes, when our practice was going well, the custodian sat in his chair a little more alert, cocking his head or smiling a little, and when I saw him like that, I knew our team’s energy was positive, that something was happening. It was great when I saw that. It wasn’t the sublime loss of self that I’d always chased as a player, but it was still great.
Now the custodian slept like a dead canary in a coal mine. The building was almost empty, and the echoing sounds of Brittany’s too-distant dribbling felt surreal as a fever dream. I felt very noticed, like a rabbit in the middle of a prairie, and then, suddenly, the custodian stood, caught my attention, pointed at his watch, and grinned like he knew he was saving me.
Leaving the gym, I mentioned to Brittany’s mom something about we’d have more players next time and it would b
e more organized. “That’s okay, this is what she needs, one-on-one attention,” she said. She might have been kind, or she might have been embarrassed by her kids’ behavior, with her unlucky two-year-old, the son with his agony of defeat, and her smart-mouthed, bathroom-dwelling daughter. I wondered how strong her resolve would remain not to have it be like it was for her in the face of such an onslaught.
Tonya’s father approached and alternately cooed into the infant carrier and told me about his own stellar high school and college basketball career, and that of Tonya’s mother.
“We keep trying to beat it through Tonya’s head how talented she is, but she doesn’t realize it. She didn’t even want to play for a while, so we said, ‘Okay, do what you want,’ and now she’s out here again.”
So far I hadn’t seen that Tonya was talented at anything other than being big, but her dad seemed to believe she was born good at basketball, and if she didn’t live up to her genes, it could only be a character flaw.
Tonya hung close, listening but acting like she wasn’t. I remembered that shrug of hers from the first practice, when I’d asked them if they’d had fun. Possibly, it was the best she could do.
It was the day before our first game, and my mind was filled with disconcerting images from our three practices. Amanda running with the basketball like a quarterback. Brittany’s audible slapping fouls. Tonya strolling down the court as the rest of the team got back on defense.
During practice I’d say, “Remember to dribble!” and “Don’t dribble so much! Pass the ball!” I’d say, “Don’t touch the other person!” and then later, when someone put their body on someone else on defense, I’d try to explain why that wasn’t a foul. “Let’s hustle!” I’d holler at Tonya, and then to Beth, “Slow down, be a little more patient.”
Basketball is a hard game to explain.
I tried to believe that the girls didn’t always do what I said because maybe ten-year-olds don’t have good self-control, or maybe they just forgot once they got out on the court and things started moving fast. So I’d remind them fifty times, hoping it would sink in on the fifty-first time.