Hey, Coach! ch. 17

"That crazy kid! I thought, running to the jungle gym with Jimmy and Sheila right behind me. But it was too late. Fudge already found out he didn't have wings." – Fourth Grade Nothing









All in all the practice would not have been a total disaster if all the boys would have showed the following day for practice, but they hadn't.  The day before had played out about as close to something as a bad dream as you could come up, Scotty acknowledged to himself as he came out of the boy's locker room.  The boys had been asked to do nothing more than start in a square around the lane, for example, pass the ball to the next boy across from them, follow their pass, and so on, but something so fierce, so mysterious had come over them at that moment.  Even with the help of the eighth grade girls right there at each step, even showing them the drill, the boys forget virtually every rule of known coordination.  Tyler was supposed to pass to Randall, but instead passed it to Will.  Will might have tossed something that resembled a skip pass diagonally to Tyler. Oh Lordy. The coach watched the trauma of misdirection sinking eyes. "I want you to think of two things: first, a box has four points.  Fill in at a point.  Easy enough, ok?" Tyler looked up the coach as though she held a bowling ball. When she handed it to him, again and again, it was as though the ball slipped right through his hands. He looked left and right, what do I do now? "The second part is also very very easy boys, you can do this, I promise.  What direction do the hands on your watches go?" Of course this was a very dangerous question to the modern 5th grade boys who may or may not have ever seen a "hand" on a watch.  Indeed, Henry was wearing a watch, a digital certainly, and began to sort of move his hand in circles over the face of the watch.  "You mean like this," he said, feeling fairly proud for speaking up.  In the background three boys had slunk over the hoop behind them and started shooting airballs. "Get back over here, boys? Boys? Back over here." Coach had looked like maybe this was not going well. She lifted her shoulders up and raised her hands while looking over to Scotty in a pleading way, like, is this for real? "No, no. I mean a hand like on an old watch, you know, that click clicks, and moves in a direction and shows you the hour and the minute." The boys looked at her dumbfounded, each of them having grabbed their bowling balls by now, and ready to shoot at the nearest hoop.  All this talk of boxes and hands sounded a lot like school, which is where they just came from.  In their minds, enough was enough.  Let me move around wildly for awhile. "Hands on a watch move clockwise, this way," she said, spinning her hand. One or two sets of eyes showed some indication of connection to this information, but it was still faint.  Coach looked to the Girl. "Corey, you take over, figure this out, and we will talk about it all later." Coach was not mean, but she was tall and she was a parent. Nobody's parent for the boys though.  She was a total stranger. She was walking away.  Basketball hoops were now open season.  They leaped from their positions and began to make strange sounds, whooping, raising their hands as though veteran players on an NBA team looking to make a move. The Girl looked at Scotty, he looked back.  "I'm the coach now," she said, and gently gathered each boy by the shirt collar to let them know what they were there for.