Nikki on the Line

by Barbara Carroll Roberts

  We all laughed.

  Coach chuckled, too. “You see where I’m going with this? All you guards have been the best ball-handlers on every team you’ve played on. You bigs have always been the tallest. But we don’t need five point guards or four centers. We need shooting guards, wings, forwards. So this is where you all take a big step up. Most of you will play positions you haven’t played before. All of you will learn new skills. You might struggle, you might not be happy with me. But my job isn’t to make you happy, right? My job is to teach you to be better ball players.”

  Coach paused, looking around at us. “You know who John Wooden was?”

  Most of us shook our heads.

  “One of the greatest basketball coaches of all time,” Coach Duval said. “Led the UCLA men’s team to ten national championships. He knew a whole lot about what it takes to excel. So I want you to hear something John Wooden said, and if you find yourself struggling to learn something new or change the way you’ve always done something, I want you to remember this: ‘Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.’”

  Coach Duval paused again, and we all stared up at him. Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do?

  But he didn’t explain what that meant. He clapped his huge hands and said, “Okay, we’ve got two weeks to get ready for our first tournament. Let’s have some fun. Let’s win some games. Let’s get to work. Line up along the baseline.”

  So we all ran over to the end of the court. Coach had really specific warm-up exercises he wanted us to do. First ankle flips, which are like a funny way of skipping; then Frankenstein walks, swinging our legs way up in front of us; then “over-unders,” walking sideways up and down the length of the court, pretending to step over a fence, then duck under it; then skipping backward; then defensive slides, which are kind of like skipping sideways.

  Then we ran sprints up and down the court three times, then line drills—sprinting from the baseline to the free throw line, back to the baseline, up to half-court, back to the baseline, up to the opposite free throw line, back to the baseline, up to the opposite baseline, then all the way back to the first baseline. Even Kim-Ly was sucking wind.

  Next came what Coach called core work. First planks, which were essentially bracing in the up position of a push-up, then sit-ups. But get this: We did our core work while dribbling a basketball. Half the team collapsed on their first attempt at holding a one-armed plank and dribbling the ball with the other hand. The rest of us collapsed every time Coach blew his whistle for us to switch hands.

  It occurred to me that he might be insane.

  Finally we stopped for a water break, and Coach zipped open his ball bag. “Everybody know the Rainbow Drill?”

  Between gulping water and gasping for air, I nodded. So did most of the other girls.

  “If you don’t know it, watch the other girls, then join in.” He pulled a bright yellow ball out of his bag, and since I was standing next to him, he tossed it to me.

  I caught it, and nearly fell forward when its weight hit my hands.

  Coach laughed. “Sorry, Lefty. I should have warned you it was a heavy ball.”

  I rolled the ball in my hands. It was stamped 3 LBS, which probably doesn’t sound very heavy, and it wouldn’t be heavy, I guess, if I were holding a kitten. But a regular basketball weighs about one pound, which I knew because I’d once weighed my official WNBA ball on Mom’s kitchen scale. So that’s what I’d been expecting when Coach tossed the yellow ball to me.

  He pulled another yellow ball out of his bag and tossed it to Kate, who was ready for it and didn’t almost fall over. We formed two lines behind the baseline, one on each side of the basket, and ran the Rainbow Drill, each of us running out a few steps, curving around in front of the basket—that’s the rainbow part—catching a pass, and laying the ball up, then getting in the other line, running out and curving around the other way, catching another pass, and laying the ball up with the other hand.

  “Count the makes,” Coach called. “Start over after a miss.”

  Normally this is a fun drill, because the whole team gets into a rhythm, and everybody’s counting and getting more excited with the more layups you make in a row. But with a ball that weighs three times as much as a regular ball, it takes a while to figure out how much force you need to launch the ball off your hand, and by the time you figure it out, your arms ache so bad you might as well be heaving a bowling ball at the basket. Our counting went like this: “One,” miss, miss, “one,” miss, “one, two,” miss, miss, miss, “one.” It was pathetic.

  After about ten hours of that, Coach Duval blew his whistle and called for another water break, but we all stood there, our arms too tired to even pick up a water bottle.

  Coach kind of chuckled. “You might hate those yellow balls now, but you’ll love them by the end of the season, when you see how much stronger you are. How many’d you make in a row?”

  “Five,” Kate said.

  “Next week you’ll keep going until you make ten in a row. Fifteen the week after that. Then twenty. By next year, you’ll be making a hundred, no sweat.”

  Now I knew Coach was crazy. The same thought must have occurred to Adria, because she shot me a look that screamed, Help!

  We both shot the same look at her dad, who was sitting up at the top of the bleachers, talking with other parents. He’d said he wanted to see how Coach Duval ran practice, but now Mr. Lawson seemed way more interested in his conversation than in the torture going on down here on the floor.

  Kate’s dad was watching, though. So was JJ’s mom. They were the only parents sitting at the bottom of the bleachers, their attention focused like laser beams on what we were doing. Kate’s dad, Mr. Nyquist, wrote stuff in a little notepad, and Mrs. Packer reminded JJ to get intense.

  Finally, Coach put away the yellow balls and tossed the regular orange ones to us. They felt like balloons after the heavy balls, and we all had to laugh about that. But Coach whistled us quiet and set us to work on ball-handling and catch-and-shoot drills.

  We stopped for another water break, and unbelievably, we still had almost an hour to go.

  “All right, basic offense,” Coach said. “We’ve got some good height on this team, so we’ll take advantage of that and run a pass-and-cut pattern to work the ball into the bigs for easy inside shots. We’ll run other plays, too, but we’ll learn this one first.”

  He split us into two groups and showed us where to stand at the beginning of the play, then walked us through the pattern, working the ball around and in, over and over, a little faster each time.

  Learning plays was always easy for me—Adria’s dad said it was because I was good at math and patterns and stuff like that—but learning this play wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t because it was complicated.

  It was because of where Coach told me to stand when we started the play. Out behind the three-point line, on the left side of the basket, way down by the baseline.

  Not at the top of the key with the ball in my hands.

  Not the point guard.

  Not the floor general.

  Not… important.

  I’d just heard Coach say a lot of us would play positions we hadn’t played before, but I hadn’t thought anything about it. He couldn’t mean me. How could he? I’d always been the point guard. On every team I’d ever played on. Coach couldn’t want me to play a different position.

  But he did.

  And he didn’t seem the least bit interested in stopping practice to explain it to me, even if I’d had the guts to ask. Which meant I was still stumbling around, not sure where to move or when to move, even though everybody else had the pattern down.

  And then it was time to scrimmage, and big surprise, it was even harder to run the play with a defender on you.

  Especially if the defender was JJ.

  Every time I had the ball, she charged up in my face hollering, “Ball, ball, ball,” and her mom yelled, “Intense, JJ. Get intense!”
And the more intense she got, the more she whacked at me, trying to steal the ball.

  Coach blew his whistle and told her to take it easy, which she did for about a minute.

  After we’d gone up and down the court five or six times, I managed to break free from JJ. I cut across in front of the hoop and called for the ball. Linnae’s pass was high, so I jumped to catch it, but the second my hand touched the ball, a JJ-shaped torpedo exploded into me. I flew about three feet and skidded across the floor.

  Coach blew his whistle. “I like your hustle, JJ, but that’s a foul. You okay, Nikki?”

  I had a giant floor burn all along the inside of one knee, but I nodded that I was okay, and tried to bounce up.

  “Good effort, good effort,” JJ’s mom called, and I started to say, “Thanks,” thinking she was talking about my terrific effort to scrape myself up off the floor.

  What was I thinking?

  Her laser-beam eyes focused only on JJ.

  I grabbed the ball and was about to pass it in to Adria, but JJ leaned up in my face and said, “Man, your eyes are really weird,” and even though I should have been ready for that, since she’d done the same thing to me in tryouts, I jerked and passed the ball straight to Taj, who wasn’t on my team, and JJ laughed and said, “Nice pass,” and Coach blew his whistle and said, “You’ve got to make better passes, Nikki. Do it again.”

  JJ kept laughing, and I wanted to throw the ball at her face, but instead I lobbed it to Adria, who turned and made a quick jump shot that banged off the backboard and dropped through the net. I wished I were still in kindergarten so I could stick out my tongue at JJ, but instead I ran, sort of, down the floor to get back on defense.

  Maura brought the ball up the floor and passed it to JJ, and I got my butt down and my hands up. And since we were supposed to be running the pass-and-cut pattern, and JJ was supposed to be looking to pass the ball inside, when she backed up and straightened up, I straightened up, too. And that’s when JJ dropped her shoulder and drove forward, going full speed toward the basket, right into me. No, actually, right over me, because after my back hit the floor, the sole of JJ’s shoe hit my arm, pinching my skin against the floor as she barreled on by.

  “JJ!” Coach hollered. “That’s a foul! Nikki had her feet set.”

  “Great effort!” Mrs. Packer called. “Really intense!”

  Adria, Kate, and Kim-Ly bent over me.

  “Are you okay?” Adria said.

  I nodded, grabbed her hand, and let her pull me up.

  “I think JJ’s actually trying to hurt you,” Kate said.

  Kim-Ly brushed floor dust off my arm. “JJ wants to be a starter. She’s trying to intimidate the other guards.”

  “She’s doing a pretty good job,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, you can’t let her,” Kim-Ly said. “I played with her last year, and she tried the same thing on me. You have to give it right back.”

  “But she’s fouling me.”

  “So? Foul her back.” Kim-Ly grinned. “Last time I checked, fouls don’t count in practice.”

  I looked at Adria. She shrugged, eyes wide, like, Yeah, maybe nobody played like this in county league, but guess what—this isn’t county league.

  Coach blew his whistle and told us to get some water, and then we were right back to work. And now, in addition to a big, raw floor burn on my knee, my back hurt where I’d hit the floor and my forearm burned where JJ’d stepped on it. My lungs burned, too, each breath sharp and raspy, and my legs were so heavy I might as well have been running through mud.

  For the first time in my entire life, I just wanted practice to be over.

  The scrimmage kept going, though, faster and faster, it seemed, while I got slower and slower. I tried my best to stay away from the ball so that maybe JJ would stay away from me, but then, wouldn’t you know it, there I was, wide open at the top of the key.

  Kim-Ly zipped a pass to me and cut toward the hoop. I looked to pass the ball back to her, but Maura had her covered. I looked for Jasmine under the basket, but Kate had her covered. I looked for Adria and Linnae, but they were covered, too, and then here came JJ crashing toward me, and I had to get rid of the ball. I was a long way from the basket, and I never shot from way out there, but I had to get rid of the ball before JJ hit me again, so I lifted my chin, squared my shoulders, and shot.

  The ball sailed up in a high arc, then dropped, barely grazing the rim, and fell through the net.

  Adria threw her hands in the air like a football referee signaling a touchdown. “Threeeeee!” she called, running across the court to slap my hand.

  I looked at my feet. Sure enough, I’d shot from behind the three-point line.

  Coach blew his whistle. “All right, Lefty,” he said. “That’s what I want to see. You looked in to pass the ball to the cutter or the big for an easy shot, but they were covered. You were open, you were in your range, so you took the shot.”

  I almost said that I wasn’t in my range, that I never shot from outside, that I was just trying to not get flattened again. But then I saw JJ glaring at me, so I decided to keep my mouth shut. I’d never made that shot before, but JJ didn’t need to know that. And now that I thought about it, Coach didn’t need to know it, either.

  “Almost done,” Coach said.

  Almost? I looked at the clock. Three minutes to nine. Couldn’t we end three minutes early? After all we’d done? Just three minutes?

  But no.

  “Line up along the baseline,” Coach said.

  So we lined up, then one by one walked out to shoot a free throw. On made shots, we clapped. On misses, we all sprinted to the opposite end of the court and back. Jasmine made her shot. So did Linnae and Autumn. All the rest of us missed. So after everything we’d done—the line drills, the planks, the heavy balls, the scrimmaging—we ran seven more up-and-back sprints to end practice.

  “Have to make your free throws, ladies,” Coach said.

  As if we hadn’t figured that out.

  And then finally, finally, we were done.

  I flopped down next to my gym bag, leaned back against the wall, and grabbed my water bottle.

  Adria sat down next to me, breathing hard and groaning, and Kate dropped down next to her.

  “We should change our team name,” I said.

  Adria and Kate looked at me.

  I took a long drink of water. “Roadkill,” I said. “The Northern Virginia Roadkill.”

  Kate started to laugh. She laughed harder and harder until she fell over sideways and lay there, laughing, gasping for breath.

  Adria and I laughed, too, laughing at how hard Kate was laughing mostly, even though laughing made my aching stomach muscles ache even more.

  JJ’s mom went over to talk with Coach Duval, and other parents headed toward the gym doors, calling to their daughters to hurry up. Kate and Adria and I untied our shoes and gathered up our stuff.

  Mr. Nyquist stepped around Kate, bent down, and dug a basketball out of her gym bag. “Keep your shoes on,” he said, straightening back up, towering over us. “Twenty-five free throws before you’re done. Twenty-five makes. Not that garbage you were all chucking up at the end of practice.”

  Kate rubbed her hands across her face, leaving a streak of sweaty dirt. “Can’t I skip it? Just for tonight? That was a killer practice.”

  Mr. Nyquist bent back down, sharp and quick as a hawk, his face an inch from hers. “One excuse leads to another. Pretty soon you’re an average player, sitting on the bench. Is that what you want?”

  Kate looked at her hands. “No.”

  Mr. Nyquist stood up. “Let’s go, then.”

  Kate retied her shoes. “Wasn’t that a nice three-pointer Nikki made?” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Nikki.” Kate pointed at me. “Wasn’t that a nice shot?”

  Mr. Nyquist looked at me. “You make that shot a lot?”

  I almost said no. But something stopped me. Something about the way he asked the questio
n, the way he looked at me. Like he knew I’d never made that shot before. Like he could guarantee I’d never make it again.

  I shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie. I mean, I’d just made one, hadn’t I?

  Mr. Bukowski Wins the Game

  It took me three tries to get my foot up on the first step of the school bus the next morning, my thigh muscles screaming at me every time I tried. Mrs. Patel, our bus driver, gave me a funny look when I grabbed the handrail to pull myself up the steps. When I finally made it to a seat and tried to sit down, those same muscles flat-out refused to cooperate, so I pretty much fell onto the seat, scraping the inside of my knee in the process. And even though I was wearing the oldest, softest pair of sweatpants I owned and had two huge bandages covering my floor burn, I still yelled, “Ow!”

  All the kids on the bus turned to stare at me, and Mrs. Patel caught my eye in the big rearview mirror.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “Basketball practice,” I said. “I’m a little sore.”

  Two stops later, when Adria hauled herself, hand over hand, up the steps, Mrs. Patel said, “Let me guess. Basketball practice?”

  Adria nodded. “My legs don’t want to move.” She dropped into the seat beside me. “I may never walk again.”

  “Tell me about it. You think everyone else is this sore?”

  “Kate texted me this morning that the only way she could get out of bed was to fall out onto the floor, then pull herself up holding on to her dresser.” Adria laughed. “I thought she was in better shape than us, since she usually plays with older girls, but I guess not. I don’t know how we’re going to survive tonight.”

  “We don’t have practice tonight,” I said. “Practice is on Tuesday and Thursday, remember? This is Wednesday.”

  “Tonight I’m going to this strength-and-conditioning workout with Kate.” Adria shifted her backpack on her lap. “Her dad told my dad about it, and my dad wants me to go. He says I need to improve my vertical leap so I’ll be a better rebounder.”