by Mike Lupica
Alex could tell she was on the verge of tears.
“I know,” Alex said, not sure what else to say in that moment.
“No,” Annie said, “you don’t know.”
“I’m on the team too,” Alex said.
“For what?” Annie said. “Twenty minutes? If you loved soccer the way I do, you never would have quit the team.”
“You know there was more to it than that,” Alex said.
Annie swept a hand through her wavy brown hair and sighed. “I know,” she said, more calmly now. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to take this out on you. I’m just mad at the whole situation. Like, why us, you know?”
“I don’t know,” Alex said, because she genuinely didn’t have an answer for Annie. Couldn’t explain why this was happening. How she could go from being so happy one minute about making the team to now potentially not even having a team to play for.
There was nothing she could say that could make Annie feel better. Or hurt less than she clearly did right now. They stood there in silence, Annie taking deep breaths and loudly letting them out, until Alex said, “There has to be something somebody can do about this.”
“There isn’t,” Annie said. “That’s what my mom says, anyway. And she’s on the board at our school.”
“How did she say they decided which sports to cut and which ones to keep?” Alex asked.
“The sports that got hit the hardest were ones that attracted the fewest new members,” Annie said. “They looked at how many girls tried out for spring soccer last year compared to this one.”
Alex thought about that. There were only three open slots on the team this season and twelve girls at tryouts. That seemed pretty competitive to Alex.
“What about lacrosse?” Alex said.
“They had twice as many girls try out,” Annie said. “Eighth-grade girls’ soccer survived the cut. But that doesn’t help if you’re in seventh.”
“But the spring team won our league last year,” Alex said.
“I know,” said Annie.
It didn’t make any logical sense. Why would the school choose to cut a team that brought in trophies and championship wins?
Annie closed her eyes, squeezing back tears, and shook her head. “Don’t they understand how much these seasons mean to us?”
“What does Coach Cross think about all this?” Alex said.
Annie clicked her phone on. “We’re about to find out in five minutes.”
The two of them started for the gym.
“And this is all about money?” Alex said as they walked.
Annie nodded.
“They can’t find the money somewhere else in the budget?”
“Mom says there isn’t any extra money anywhere.” She rested her hands on top of her head. “There would have been, except they realized it costs way more to build new fields for soccer and lacrosse than they thought.”
Now Alex blew out some air, like steam.
“That makes no sense!” she said. “To take away soccer so they can build a new soccer field?”
“We have to do something,” Annie said.
“Oh, we will,” Alex said. She wasn’t about to lose her season to a stupid budget cut.
A plan hadn’t formed just yet, but Alex vowed to come up with one soon.
Just then, the boys’ seventh-grade soccer team came walking down the hall, dressed in their gear, on their way into the gym.
It was unfair to think, but Alex couldn’t help but feel cheated. It wasn’t their fault, but the boys’ team would have their season. They were going to get to do something the girls couldn’t.
Alex knew that just wasn’t right.
And not just when it came to soccer.
13
Coach Cross surprised them when they got to the gym, in more ways than one, but starting with this: she didn’t act as if the season had just gotten canceled. In fact, she spoke as if it were just beginning.
“Grab your jackets or parkas or hoodies or whatever,” she said. “I don’t think anybody would call this a beach day in Orville, but we’re practicing outside today.”
“Coach,” Annie said. “Didn’t you hear what happened? They called off seventh-grade girls’ soccer. It was announced in the Patch.”
“Why would we have practice,” Lindsey said, “if we’re not going to be playing any games?”
“I’m sorry,” Coach said dramatically. “Did you all stop being soccer players the moment you heard the news from our illustrious Town Council?”
She was smiling—happy, even. As if nothing had changed. As if the Orville Patch never ran any stories on budget cuts. As if she were living in some kind of alternate universe.
Alex couldn’t make heads or tails of it. They had brought her in, this local soccer legend, to coach their team. Only now there was no team.
The girls looked at each other, wondering if they should follow Coach Cross’s orders and get their jackets. Finally, Carly Jones spoke.
“You know what?” she said to her teammates. “We are still players. So let’s go play.”
As they were about to leave the gym, the double doors opened, and in walked all the girls who hadn’t made the team. They already had their jackets on, and Alex could see they were also wearing shin guards over their sweatpants, and soccer cleats.
“I don’t understand,” Alex said to Coach Cross.
“If the best we can do is play games against each other,” she said, “I figured we’d need all the players we could get.”
Then she picked up the ball at her feet, bounced it off one knee, and headed for the field.
“I had a feelin’ I was going to like this school,” Roisin said to Alex.
They bumped fists as Alex said, “Let’s do this.”
She just wasn’t quite sure what this was.
14
They were outside now and glad to be wearing extra layers. The sun had disappeared behind the clouds, and the day hadn’t just become grayer but also a whole lot colder.
Once on the field, though, running and passing the ball around, getting the blood flowing, Alex knew how good it felt to be back. She could see it on the faces of her teammates too. They were happy to be out here, regardless of what the news said.
After warm-ups, Coach Cross gathered everyone around her. She was holding a soccer ball under her arm. Alex noticed she always had one close by.
“Listen, I’m not going to lie,” she said. “I was as shocked as all of you to hear the news today. I’d jumped at the chance to coach you guys because I had the time of my life playing here in Orville when I was a kid. Guess I just love soccer!”
“We love it too!” Carly said. “Only now we aren’t going to get to play.”
“But the boys are,” Lindsey muttered.
“Let’s be clear,” Coach said. “The boys didn’t do anything wrong. And I don’t believe the Town Council went out of their way to single out seventh-grade girls. It’s just the way things worked out. But we’re going to make the most of it.”
“It feels like somebody knocked us down,” Annie said.
“And today we start getting back up,” Coach Cross said with a boost of enthusiasm. “And by the way?” she continued. “Anybody can get knocked down. It doesn’t tell the world anything about our character or our talent or our heart. You know what does? How we get back up.”
Alex hung on to Coach Cross’s every word.
Empowered. That’s how she felt. Ready to fight.
“But now there’s no league for us to play in,” Ally McGee said. “How are we supposed to compete?”
“Guess we’ll have to figure out a way to be our own league,” Coach said.
After they had finished with their passing and shooting drills, Coach divided them up into teams, mixing and matching with the new girls and the holdovers to
keep things fair.
Alex and Roisin were up front on one team with Carly in the goal. Rashida played keeper for Annie and Lindsey’s side.
The field was a little slick, but they’d gotten used to it during warm-ups. And considering that only half of them had ever played together, Alex thought that the passing and teamwork was pretty strong between the teams.
It almost felt like a real game.
No one was more into it than Alex, who felt as if she’d never been away. It’d been a full year since she’d played soccer on a team, but just like riding a bike, muscle memory kicked in. It felt natural, easy. Sure, she missed open teammates early on. She missed a couple of shots too. But it was the feeling that had returned to her. The feeling of making a good pass. Of having a clean takeaway in the open field. Or a good tackle. A soccer tackle, not like the kind in football. In soccer that meant engaging a player on the other team and taking the ball away cleanly, even if the two of you collided.
With a minute left in the scrimmage and the score still 0–0, Alex did precisely that with Lindsey at midfield. Pretty much a perfect play, if she did say so herself. Alex slid at the exact right moment, managed to kick the ball away from Lindsey, jumped to her feet, and got control of it in one swift motion. Then passed it ahead to a streaking Roisin.
Lindsey tried to flop, even though Alex hadn’t made any contact with her, throwing her arms up into the air as if Alex had just put a football tackle on her.
“Hey!” she yelled.
But from behind them Alex heard Coach Cross say, “C’mon, Lindsey. A light breeze would have had a better chance of putting you on the ground.”
But by then Alex was flying after Roisin, both of them hoping to score the first goal of the game. Roisin looked to her left and saw Alex catching up with her, so she passed the ball back when she saw the open field in front of her. Then Alex was splitting two defenders, Andi Welles and Karla Morant. Roisin faded a bit, creating more separation between herself and Alex, and giving herself more room to run. Then she slowed down just a touch because even though it was a practice game Coach Cross had been blowing the whistle every time one of them went offsides.
Alex expertly dribbled the ball. She’d made such a good, fast move on Andi and Karla that now there was no one between Alex and Roisin and Rashida in the goal.
Let Rashida make the first move, Alex told herself.
Rashida didn’t know whether Alex was passing or shooting.
But Alex did.
Rashida’s eyes were fixed on Alex coming toward her with the ball. Alex watched her right back, the ball on her right foot, knowing exactly where it was without having to look down.
At the last possible moment, Alex stopped and wound up with her right leg, like she was looking to drive one home.
Rashida leaned to her right, guessing from Alex’s body position that she’d be going that way, putting a natural hook on the ball.
But Alex wasn’t shooting. Instead, she looked down at the ball and slid it with her left foot, just a gentle nudge, over to Roisin.
Her backyard move with a twist.
All Roisin had to do was nudge the ball herself into the wide-open net to Rashida’s left.
Game over at 1–0. Or one-nil, as the announcers liked to say in soccer.
Alex had no idea what would become of their team going forward, or where they were heading from here. None of them did, not even Coach Cross.
But after this one day, she knew no matter what, if they were lucky enough to have one, this would be a season to remember.
Roisin came running over, and they both jumped into the air and bumped chests.
“Now I know why you were such a good quarterback,” Roisin said to her.
15
They practiced every day for the rest of the week after school, scrimmaging with their suddenly supersized team to prepare for a season they didn’t know if they’d ever have.
Every time one of them would ask Coach Cross her honest opinion about what might happen, she’d just smile and shrug and say, “Working on it,” before reminding them that they were still weeks away from their first league game against Palmer.
On Friday afternoon, when practice was over, Annie asked, “But what we’re doing right now could all be for nothing, right?”
“Let me ask you something, Annie,” Coach said. “What we’re doing every day on that field, does that feel like nothing to you? Because it doesn’t look like nothing to me.”
Annie placed her hands on her hips, catching her breath. “It’s just . . . we’ve put in so much work,” she said.
“Didn’t look like work to me either,” Coach said with a wink.
* * *
• • •
Gabe called the next morning to ask if Alex was up for meeting him at the middle school field to kick her soccer ball around.
“Unless you’re going to be a weather weenie and say it’s too cold,” Gabe said.
“It is too cold!” she whined.
“Weenie,” he said.
“You know I’m bluffing,” Alex said, and told Gabe she’d meet him there.
Alex took her bike to Gabe’s house, and the two of them rode over to Orville Middle. When they arrived, Alex quickly discovered the field was even slicker than it’d been at the previous day’s practice. Alex even slipped a couple of times trying to plant a foot and fire a shot at Gabe in the goal, landing on her butt more times than she could count.
“Ouch?” she said to Gabe the second time it happened.
“Wait,” Gabe said, “my quarterback can’t take a hit? Make it make sense.”
Alex got back up. Gabe came out of the goal. They got about twenty yards apart and passed the ball back and forth, trapping the ball and controlling it before kicking it back. Gabe, Alex knew, had been a tremendous soccer player himself through fifth grade before switching to baseball. Football was still his favorite sport. But now he enjoyed being a baseball pitcher almost as much.
He’d once explained to her that as much fun as soccer was, he preferred sports where you could use your hands. Now he had the best of both worlds: catching footballs and throwing baseballs.
Jabril had told her at lunch that nobody in their league threw a fastball like Gabe. He was turning thirteen in a month, which meant this summer he’d be old enough to move up from Little League to Babe Ruth, on what he called “the big field.”
It was even colder today than it had been at Friday’s practice, and Alex asked Gabe if he wanted to keep playing. He said he was about soccer-ed out for one Saturday morning, checking his phone and telling her it was almost time for lunch.
“Tell you what,” Alex said. “We play fifteen more minutes and I’ll buy us slices at Sam’s.”
“Can’t pass up a deal like that,” he said.
Alex was holding the ball now, smiling at one of her best friends in the world.
“What?” he said.
“I’m just happy to be back on a field with you,” she said. “It’s like we’re teammates again.”
“We will be soon enough.”
Alex tossed him the soccer ball football-style, putting more than a little zip on it. Gabe caught it easily, of course. He wasn’t kidding about using his hands. Alex figured he could probably catch a flying fish if he had the chance.
“Good to know you can still throw,” Gabe said. “Now kick me a deep ball so we can see how your soccer skills measure up.”
“Carlisle to Hildreth?” Alex said.
“Carlisle trying to outkick Hildreth’s coverage this time!” Gabe yelled back as he took off down the field.
Before he was out of her range, she stepped into her kick and let it go with everything she had.
She thought she’d led him perfectly.
She hadn’t.
The ball was a little too far in front of him. But th
is was Gabe. He was as competitive as she was. Even now, he refused to miss a single ball. He was going to catch up with it. Whatever it took.
Alex watched as he was about to extend, stretch out with his legs the way he did with his arms when the football was nearly out of reach.
Saw him take one last huge stride with his right leg.
Saw his left foot give out on the slippery field, his knee twist, and his whole leg collapse beneath him.
Alex could tell something was wrong right away.
She bolted toward him, careful not to slip on the wet ground, as Gabe cried out in pain, reaching for his left knee with both hands, clutching it to his chest.
16
Gabe was sitting on the damp grass right where he’d fallen. Alex squatted down next to him, keeping him still while they waited for their dads to arrive.
“I can walk,” Gabe pleaded.
“I know you can walk,” Alex said. “I’m just not going to let you.”
She sat down next to him. The ground was cold, but she didn’t care. All that mattered now was helping Gabe any way she could.
“This is all my fault,” she said. “We should have gone right to Sam’s when you wanted to. I was the one who talked you into staying out here.”
Gabe had his legs stretched out in front of him. Alex noticed the grass stains on the knees of his sweats.
“You didn’t make me do anything,” he said. “And anyway, I’m the one who told you to kick the long ball.”
She had him pull up his left pant leg, where they noticed his knee beginning to swell up. He said he might have stepped in a little divot in the field. That’s when he felt his leg give out, like someone had hit him from behind with a rolling block.
Alex felt awful. Gabe was one of her closest friends and an ally on the football field. She couldn’t have made it through the season without his friendship and support. Now she was worried he might have injured himself badly enough to compromise his baseball season. Possibly causing him to miss it entirely.
