Benchwarmers

by John Feinstein

  Arlow gave her a wave but continued loosening up with his pals Mark and Ethan. That was fine with Andi. The fact that they seemed to have accepted her as someone who could help the team was enough.

  Practice was routine, although Andi—again—spent time with the second unit. She had thought those days were over, but for some reason Coach J had decided her absence from practice Tuesday was an excuse to limit her—at least in practice.

  Coach C had called on Tuesday night to make certain there had been no setbacks and to be sure she’d be able to practice on Wednesday.

  “Don’t be too surprised if Coach J limits you a little bit,” he had said. “Part of it is, he wants you to be careful. The other part of it you probably understand.”

  Andi was tempted to ask him to elaborate but decided there was no point.

  They didn’t practice for very long on Wednesday, and Coach J said that practice Thursday was optional, since he knew some of them had papers to finish and tests on Friday.

  “We aren’t going to do all that much anyway,” he said. “Rest is as important as practice at this point in the season. Plus, I don’t want some teacher telling me next week that one of you is flunking a subject and you can’t play in one or both of our last two games. So only come tomorrow if you’re comfortable you are in good shape with your schoolwork.”

  They all nodded and listened, and then everyone showed up on Thursday. The season would be over a week from Friday—unless they somehow won the conference and got to play one extra game. No one wanted to miss a practice. It proved sixth-grade schoolwork wasn’t that hard, Andi mused, voicing that thought to Jeff and Mike Craig as they walked off the practice field.

  “Even for Arlow,” she added.

  They both laughed.

  Andi wondered if she’d be in the starting lineup the next day or if Coach J would be up to his old tricks of keeping her on the bench until she was really needed.

  * * *

  Jeff provided the answer when they went out to warm up the next day, the coldest of the year so far. Halloween and the end of daylight saving time were a little more than two weeks away and Andi could already feel winter closing in. She hated the end of daylight saving time—the sun setting before five o’clock. It just felt so dark.

  “Same starters as the Cynwyd game,” Jeff told her. “I guess Coach knows there’s no time to mess around with his silly biases right now.”

  As expected, Blue Bell was a tough out. Like Merion, Blue Bell had one girl on the team. Unlike Andi, she played on defense, which meant that she and Andi came face-to-face with each other on a number of occasions.

  They shook hands and introduced themselves just before kickoff—Andi glancing over her shoulder to make sure Coach J wasn’t watching.

  “Carrie O’Shea,” the girl from Blue Bell said. “I’ve followed your story. I admire what you’ve done.”

  “No such craziness on your side?” Andi asked.

  Carrie smiled. “None,” she said. “It helps that my mom is the assistant coach.”

  They both laughed. Andi hadn’t noticed that one of the Blue Bell coaches was a woman. Now she did.

  The first half was scoreless. Each goalie made one great save. The Blue Bell goalie’s save was on Andi, who had gotten a pretty lead pass from Arlow and cut into the box, Carrie O’Shea step for step with her. Andi pulled up, cut outside to clear space, and fired a shot she thought was headed for the corner.

  But the goalie took a quick step, jumped, and managed to deflect the ball just over the top of the goal.

  * * *

  At halftime Coach J told them he was going to try something a little different in terms of subbing. Every player had to be on the field for at least five minutes and every player had to be off for at least five minutes.

  Instead of taking the team’s best players out one at a time, he decided to gamble and take the entire front line—Arlow, Andi, and Craig—out to start the half. His thinking, he said, was that Merion would just play to keep the score tied, and then the trio would come in with a few extra minutes of rest and jump-start the offense.

  It sounded good in theory until Danny Diskin, perhaps a little overamped knowing his team needed to keep the score at 0–0, took down a Blue Bell player in the penalty box, leading to a penalty kick.

  Blue Bell was the first team Merion had played whose players had their names on the back of their uniforms. It turned out that one of the parents worked for a company that sold sports gear and he’d gotten the uniforms custom-made.

  As a result, watching from the bench with Arlow and Craig, Andi knew that the player Diskin had taken down was named Gibbons. He slammed the penalty kick past Bobby Woodward and, three minutes into the half, Blue Bell led, 1–0.

  “Well, that strategy worked out well,” Arlow said as the players came up the field for the kickoff.

  “We have to wait two more minutes before we go back in,” Craig said.

  “He could put us back in now, then take us out for two minutes later,” Andi said.

  The conference assigned someone from a neutral school to every game to keep track of who was playing and who wasn’t. She wondered if Coach J might try to get them back in a little earlier—take a chance on whether it would be noticed—but he wasn’t looking in their direction.

  “We’ll just have to figure out a way to score twice when we get back in there,” Craig said. “Simple as that.”

  Only it wasn’t as simple as that. As if determined to make up for his mistake, Danny Diskin took off on a run down the right side after the kickoff, with Jeff racing alongside, closer to the middle of the field. Diskin dodged a Blue Bell player named Shuck with a sweet kick between the defender’s legs and tapped a pass to Jeff, who looked like he was going to blast a shot from just outside the penalty area.

  At the last possible second, though, Jeff pushed the ball left, to where Mark Adkins, playing up front in Andi’s spot, had been left wide-open. The goalie had moved to his left in anticipation of Jeff’s shot. Now, he dived back in the other direction, but was a split second late. Adkins’s shot didn’t have much on it, but he was close enough to the goal and open enough that it slid just past the keeper’s reach and into the net.

  Andi was stunned, not just that they had scored, but the way they’d scored. Jeff’s improvement as a player from the tryouts until now was amazing. What’s more, she’d have bet money that Adkins wouldn’t have been able to find the net—even from five feet away. But he had.

  Remarkably, the game was tied at one all. It had taken less than a minute for Merion to tie the score.

  “Well,” Arlow said, “I guess Coach did know what he was doing.”

  They all laughed.

  Two minutes later, there was a dead ball and Coach J waved all three of them back into the game.

  “It’s up to us now,” Craig said as they jogged onto the field, high-fiving the three players coming out.

  Andi nodded. He was right. There were no excuses now. If they wanted any shot at a conference title, they had to figure out a way to win this game.

  35

  As it turned out, winning the game wasn’t nearly as difficult as Andi had thought it would be.

  Perhaps giving up the tying goal so quickly took something out of the Blue Bell players. Or maybe it was the sight of Merion’s three best scorers coming back onto the field right after that goal. But something seemed to go out of them during the final twenty minutes.

  Arlow scored the go-ahead goal with just under ten minutes to play, on a pass from Zack Roth, who chipped the ball over all the Blue Bell defenders’ heads to Arlow in the penalty box. Arlow timed his move perfectly so as not to be offside, gathered the ball in, dodged the goalie when he dived at him, and booted the ball into what had become an empty net.

  Five minutes later, after Blue Bell had turned the ball over trying to push for a tying goal, Jeff sent Andi down the left side with a long pass. She dodged one defender and cut into the box. Before she could make a move, th
e other Blue Bell defender—Roberts—took her down hard, hard enough that the referee raced in waving a yellow card.

  Although Andi popped right back up, Jeff and Craig came running in, clearly wanting a piece of Roberts for the hard tackle.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Craig yelled, pointing a finger at him.

  “Playing soccer,” Roberts answered. “What’s the matter, I can’t tackle her ’cause she’s a girl?”

  It was the referee who answered. “You can’t tackle anyone that way,” he said, digging into his uniform and pulling out a red card. “The yellow is for the tackle. The red is for your lack of sportsmanship.”

  He pointed to the sideline to indicate Roberts had been ejected.

  The Blue Bell bench erupted. Both coaches, male and female, charged onto the field, screaming at the referee.

  “Red card for what?” the head coach yelled.

  “For not admitting his tackle was over the line,” the referee said. “I probably should have given him the red right away for the tackle.”

  The coach calmed down. He put an arm around Roberts and led him from the field without another word.

  The Merion coaches had also come onto the field just in case a fight broke out.

  “Andi, you okay to take the penalty kick?” Coach J asked.

  “I got kicked in the shin, I’m a little sore,” Andi answered. “Let Ron take it.”

  Coach J nodded.

  Arlow was standing there, hands on hips. “You sure, Andi?” he said. “It should be your kick.”

  “Just bury it, Ron,” Andi said.

  He pointed a finger at her. “You got it,” he said.

  The referee whistled everyone back into place and put the ball down on the penalty spot.

  Arlow waited for the whistle, then did a stutter-step approach and booted the ball as Andrews, the goalie, dived helplessly in the wrong direction. It landed cleanly in the net, for a 3–1 lead.

  That was the game. Coach Johnston took Andi out a minute later because she was limping a little.

  “We’ve got this,” he said. “Get off your feet.”

  For the first time all season, Andi didn’t mind being taken out of a game.

  * * *

  That was the last score before the final whistle. In the handshake line, Roberts apologized to Andi.

  “Frustration play,” he said. “I’m sorry about the crack about you being a girl. You’re a great player.”

  “Apology accepted,” Andi said. “Thanks.”

  The last player in the Blue Bell line was Carrie O’Shea. After they had shaken hands, she pulled Andi aside.

  “Listen, I need to tell you something you may not know,” she said.

  Andi was puzzled.

  “You guys finish the season next Friday against King of Prussia–North,” she said.

  “I know,” Andi said.

  “My mom just told me they tied today. That means if you guys win on Tuesday, you can win the conference by beating them. You win, you’ll be tied at six, one, and one and you’ll have the tiebreaker because you beat them.”

  Andi was still puzzled. She knew the math already. They had talked about it before the game. The news that Cynwyd had tied King of Prussia–North was important, but why was O’Shea explaining it to her?

  O’Shea read her mind and got to her point. “When we played them, the entire game most of their players were yelling at me that I didn’t belong on the field, that I needed to go play girls’ sports with other girls or that I should be taking a cooking class.”

  “Seriously?” Andi said. She hadn’t encountered anything even close to that until Roberts’s crack about Craig being upset with his tackle because she was a girl.

  “Very seriously,” O’Shea said. “Apparently their coach makes your guy look like a leader of the Me Too movement. And the players take their cue from him. They went after me with dirty tackles a few times.

  “If the game is to decide the title, it’ll probably be worse. You need to watch yourself.”

  Andi was caught off guard by this news. She hadn’t heard anything about it before now, but then again, why would she? It wasn’t as if the conference website was going to talk about it.

  “Thanks,” she said finally, offering O’Shea a hand. “I appreciate the heads-up.”

  O’Shea smiled. “Sure,” she said. “I hope you guys win both your games next week. I’d love to see you knock those jerks off their pedestal.”

  “Well, Cynwyd did its part today,” Andi said.

  “Yeah,” O’Shea said. “I’ll bet it just about killed KP–North to be tied by a team that has not one but two girls on it.”

  “Well, here’s hoping we go them one better next week.”

  O’Shea grinned. “Make sure you win on Tuesday first. Friday won’t matter unless you win that game. KP–North will beat Gladwynne easy.”

  Andi knew she was right. Unless Merion beat McKinley on Tuesday, Friday’s game would be strictly for pride. She wanted it to be more than that.

  * * *

  Jeff was about to walk over to Andi when he saw she was in some kind of deep conversation with the girl who had played defense for Blue Bell.

  He waited until they finished, standing at a respectful distance so it wouldn’t look as if he was eavesdropping. When Andi shook hands with the girl, he waited until she walked over to him.

  “What was that about?” he asked. “Female bonding?”

  She gave him what was clearly a nasty look. “Really?” she said. “You too?”

  He quickly backed off, a little surprised that she’d reacted so angrily.

  “Kidding,” he said. “So what was it?”

  She sighed.

  “According to her, KP–North’s players and coach really don’t like the idea of girls on the soccer field—at least not a soccer field with boys on it.”

  “How does she know that?”

  Another look. “She played against them, remember?” Andi said. “There were all sort of cracks about girls belonging in cooking classes and a number of dirty tackles. Apparently the coach is even worse on the subject than Coach J. It’s just never come up because they didn’t have any girls try out for their team.”

  “So she was warning you about them?”

  This time he got a nod—a major improvement.

  “Exactly. Carrie says if we end up playing them for the championship, they’ll probably be especially nasty and chippy.”

  “What’s chippy?” Jeff asked.

  “Trying to get away with dirty plays. Trying to start trouble,” she answered.

  “Well, unless someone beats them or ties them, that won’t be a problem,” Jeff said.

  She put her hands on her hips. “Well, unless we lose Tuesday, it will be a problem,” she said. “Cynwyd tied them today. Carrie’s mom told her.”

  Jeff hadn’t heard.

  “Hey, you two, come on, everyone in the locker room.”

  It was Coach C.

  “Wonder what this is about,” Jeff muttered.

  “Probably that KP–North didn’t win today and we’ve got a chance now.”

  “A chance or a problem?”

  She smiled and said, “Both.”

  36

  Andi was right. Coach J wanted everyone to know that King of Prussia–North had been held to a tie by Cynwyd that afternoon, meaning if Merion beat McKinley on Tuesday it would play KP–North for the championship the following Friday.

  “We’ve come a long way after the way we started,” he said. “You’ve won some very tough games and overcome a lot.” He looked directly at Andi and Jeff. “Some of you more than others. I’m very proud of you—regardless of what happens next week.”

  He paused, and Jeff saw a rare smile cross his lips. “But I’d rather be proud of you for winning the next two games than losing them.”

  Everyone clapped when he was finished, and Andi headed for the door. She gave Jeff a wave as she left and said, “Have a good weekend
.”

  Jeff waved back.

  Danny Diskin sat down on the chair next to him. He had a wide smile on his face.

  “You better do it soon,” he said.

  “Do what soon?” Jeff asked.

  “Ask her to the Halloween dance.”

  “What are you talking about?” He stopped himself.

  “Are you kidding?” Danny said, laughing. “You should see the look on your face whenever you talk to her. You might as well be wearing a sign that says, ‘I’m in love with Andi…’”

  Jeff punched his pal in the arm. “Shut up,” he said, looking around, hoping no one else was listening.

  “What, you think I’m the only one who knows?” Danny said. “Let me tell you something, pal, you better ask her soon, because just about every guy in this room is thinking about asking her—including me. Only reason it hasn’t happened is because we’re all just as nervous about getting turned down as you are.”

  “What about Craig?” Jeff asked.

  “He’s not nervous,” Danny said. “Half the girls in the sixth grade have asked him.”

  “And?”

  “He’s told everyone he’s not going to decide who he’s going with until after the season’s over.”

  “It’s good to be king, huh?”

  “Yeah, but you can still be Prince Charming if you get off your butt and do something. She likes you.”

  “How do you know that?” Jeff asked, feeling his stomach tying into a knot.

  “Same reason I know you like her,” Danny said. “I’m only eleven, but I’m not blind or stupid.”

  “So you think I should ask her,” Jeff said.

  Danny leaned forward and took Jeff’s head in his hands. “Do you need me to hit you over the head with a hammer? Ask her!”

  He got up, took off his shorts, wrapped a towel around his waist, and headed for the shower.

  * * *

  Jeff went with his dad to the Eagles-Giants game on Sunday. Because Jeff couldn’t sit in the press box during the game, his father had gotten Jeff and his mom seats in the NBCSP box during the game.