Nikki on the Line

by Barbara Carroll Roberts

  The score stayed close, mostly because Kate and Taj could shoot over their defenders. Coach subbed us in and out a lot, trying to keep fresh legs in the game, but midway through the second half, my legs turned to Jell-O, and no matter how hard I told myself to hustle and keep pushing, my legs flat-out refused. All the other Action girls must have had Jell-O legs by that time, too, because they were all dragging their feet. Even Kim-Ly walked the ball up the court instead of sprinting like she usually did, and JJ stopped bashing into people.

  With a few minutes to go, we were completely gassed, and the other team pulled away. They ended up winning by eight points.

  When the horn finally blew to end the game, we slapped hands with the other team, then collapsed onto the bleachers around Coach.

  “Well, other than getting run into the ground, you did okay,” Coach said. “Played tough defense. Hit the boards hard for rebounds. Kept looking for the open man on offense.” He looked around at us. “So, what did we learn from this game?”

  “Don’t play teams full of superfast guards,” Kate said, and everybody laughed, including Coach.

  “Yeah, that’s one approach,” he said. “What else?”

  “We need to be in better shape,” Adria said.

  Coach nodded. “You ready to run more sprints in practice next week?”

  We all groaned, but we all nodded, too.

  “All right, then. ‘Action’ on three,” Coach said. “One, two, three.”

  “ACTION!”

  Everybody headed out for lunch.

  I took off my shoes and changed my socks and stepped into my slide sandals.

  “You want to come to lunch with us?” Adria said. “Kate and her dad are coming. We’re going to a deli down the street that Mom likes.”

  I shook my head. “We packed our lunch.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you later, then.” She followed Kate out of the gym.

  Mom and Sam and I went outside to eat lunch at a picnic table with Kim-Ly’s family and Taj’s family. It was nice to be outside, away from the noise and heat and smells inside the gym. And it was fun to be with Kim-Ly and Taj. Like Adria and me, they’d been friends since kindergarten, so they had all kinds of goofy jokes and stories they told about each other. But I couldn’t help thinking about Adria and Kate and what they might be talking and laughing about.

  After lunch we gathered back together in the bleachers, the parents in one big group and us girls next to them. I sat next to Autumn, who held up bottles of orange and blue nail polish and offered to paint everyone’s nails. Maura and Linnae jumped up, shouting, “Me first!” and hurdled the bleacher benches, racing toward Autumn, throwing their hips into each other, laughing and shrieking, until Maura slammed her shin into a bench and let out a howl, and Coach said, “Ladies, let’s don’t have a broken leg up here in the bleachers. Save the competition for the court.”

  Kim-Ly pulled a pack of playing cards from her gym bag, and she and Taj played a game called Spit that involved a lot of slapping the cards down on the bench between them, and Maura hollered, “Dude, you guys, quit bouncing the bench around! You’re messing up my nail job!” Jasmine lay down on a bench with her head on her gym bag and big headphones clamped over her ears, and said, “Ohmygod, I am so tired. Wake me up at game time, you guys, okay?” And JJ stood on the floor, dribbling the ball back and forth between her legs, watching the nail painting.

  Adria and Kate came back in with their parents. They wanted their nails done, too, but Autumn said the polish wouldn’t have time to dry before our next game.

  “Hmph,” Adria said, digging her shoes out of her gym bag, and Taj said, “Oh man, I love those shoes!”

  And then there was Coach, standing up, saying, “Let’s go, ladies.”

  We ran our warm-up—during which Kate threw up into a trash can. Then the horn on the game clock sounded, so we ran onto the floor to do our shooting drills. But before we got halfway through, shouting erupted from the scorer’s table.

  We all turned to look.

  It was hard to understand what was going on at first. Both referees, Coach Duval, and the other team’s coach stood together, and it seemed like the other team’s coach was mad about something, waving his arms around and pointing at our team. We finally figured out that he didn’t believe Kate or Taj were eighth graders. He wanted to see their birth certificates.

  Coach Duval pulled a binder out of his ball bag and leafed through it to the copies of the birth certificates we all had to give him when he registered our team with the league. He took out two of them, and right about then the game clock blared, signaling it was time to start the game.

  The refs glanced at the birth certificates for about ten milliseconds, handed them back to Coach Duval, and headed onto the court, ready to start. But the other team’s coach grabbed the papers, put on a pair of glasses, and studied them, trying to figure out if they were fakes, I guess.

  All this time Kate’s dad and JJ’s mom were shouting stuff like, “Start the game!” “They’re all the right age!” “Forfeit if you’re afraid to play our girls!”

  Until finally Mr. Nyquist yelled, “For crying out loud! Why would I want my daughter to play down? She should be playing against high school girls instead of wasting her time against a kindergarten team!”

  That sent the other team’s coach charging toward Mr. Nyquist, at which point Mr. Nyquist—all six-and-a-half feet of him—stood up out of his folding chair to tower over the other team’s coach. The refs sprinted across the court to get between them, their hands pressed against each man’s chest, pushing them apart, and Jasmine’s dad jumped over a chair to take hold of Mr. Nyquist’s arm and walk him away.

  And then we all just stood there, staring at each other—everybody except Kate. She sat on our bench with her eyes squeezed shut and her hands over her ears.

  I looked at Mom. She stood next to Adria’s mom, her eyes wide, her arms wrapped tight around Sam, like she was ready to grab him up and run in case a riot broke out.

  The refs called both coaches to the middle of the floor and talked to them, and after that, Coach gathered all us girls together and herded us over to our parents. “I know tempers can get short sometimes,” Coach said, “but we need to all calm down. Any more outbursts, the refs won’t bother with technical fouls. They’ll throw us out of the gym. And we don’t want to be that team that gets thrown out of gyms, right?”

  Mr. Nyquist started to say something, but Coach held up his hand, frowned one of his scary-looking frowns, and said, “How about we just let the girls play?”

  So what all that meant was that by the time we finally started the game, we were so far behind schedule the refs made us play with a running clock—not stopping the clock for fouls or free throws or the ball going out of bounds. And as it turned out, that was a good thing, because not only was the other team not tall and not fast, their coach hadn’t taught them how to stay low and get their hands up on defense or to do much of anything on offense except dribble the ball around and try to drive into the lane, which was impossible because Kate or Taj or Adria or Jasmine was always between them and the basket.

  At halftime we were ahead twenty-eight to three. Which meant nobody wanted this game to go on any longer than it had to.

  During halftime Coach drew up a couple of new plays on his clipboard and told us we had to run through them five times before anyone took a shot, and then, about halfway through the second half, he took out all our bigs and kept them on the bench for the rest of the game, and even with all that, we won forty-four to ten.

  But none of those forty-four points came from me, even though Kate called out a couple of times, “Nikki, take that shot!” and Adria yelled, “Shoot, Nikki!” I was still completely focused on not making mistakes and not doing stupid stuff and not getting in somebody else’s way.

  After the game, we all lined up and slapped hands with the other team and said, “Good game,” like usual, but you could tell that those girls just wanted to get out of
the gym as fast as they could.

  We followed Coach to the bleachers and grouped around him. “Wow, not much of a game,” he said. “I don’t know how that team got into our bracket. Somebody’s mistake.”

  He set his ball bag on a bleacher bench and turned so he was kind of including the parents in our team meeting. “Okay, listen up. We’re heading into the big tournaments now. The tournaments that count toward who gets to play in the national championships. No more easy wins. Some of the games are going to get tense. Some are going to be more physical than you girls are used to. And we’re all going to get wound up tight sometimes, me included. So we need to take care of each other, right? Because, like I said before, we don’t ever want to be the team that gets kicked out of a gym.”

  He looked around at all of us and turned to look at the parents. “Right?”

  We all nodded and the parents nodded, too, then Coach turned back to us.

  “We’ve got two weeks before the next tournament,” he said. “Two weeks to get ready to play some of the best teams in our region and show them what we’ve got. You ready for that?”

  We all nodded harder.

  “All right. ‘Action’ on three,” he said. “One, two, three.”

  “ACTION!”

  A couple of parents clapped and a couple others came over to talk to Coach, and everybody gathered up their stuff and headed out. Mom and Sam went to get the car.

  I pulled off my shoes, dropped them into my gym bag, and put on my slide sandals to walk outside. When I got up, Coach was still standing at the bottom of the bleachers.

  “Nikki,” he said when I got down to the floor, “are you having fun?”

  “What?”

  “Are you having fun playing on this team?”

  “Um…”

  We walked a few steps, Coach obviously shortening his stride to stay beside me.

  “Let me put it a different way,” he said. “Why aren’t you shooting?”

  Oh boy. What should I say? Because I’m a Black Hole on the Basketball Court and I don’t want to get in the way of girls who actually belong in this league? “Um, well, I guess I haven’t been open.”

  “You’ve been open,” Coach said, “and in your range.”

  That kind of hung there between us for a minute while we walked toward the gym doors.

  “Seems like something’s spooked you, Nikki. What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m, um… I’m afraid of doing stupid stuff and taking bad shots and making us lose, like I did in the first game.” The words tumbled out in a rush before I could stop them. “In county league I could drive to the hoop or shoot from the lane, but I can’t do that now, because the girls on these teams are so much bigger and faster. Well, except for this last team.”

  “So why didn’t you shoot in that game?”

  “I… I don’t know.” I looked up at him. “But also, I’ve never been a shooting guard before. I’ve always been a point guard. It’s always been my job to get the ball to the open player.”

  Coach stopped short. “Really?”

  I nodded.

  “Hunh.” He boosted his ball bag up on his shoulder. “You came in early to the second tryout and stood there form-shooting all by yourself, nobody making you do it. I figured, here’s a pure shooter.”

  “I wanted to be as good as I could be at the tryout.”

  Coach smiled. “You were good, Lefty. You competed real hard.”

  We started walking again and pushed through the big gym doors, the sharp afternoon sun making me squint.

  Mom swung our car into the traffic circle in front of the gym, tooted the horn, and waved.

  Coach waved back, then put his hand on my shoulder. “Here’s the deal, Nikki. I see you working hard on defense. And defense is important—don’t get me wrong. But if you don’t attack just as hard on offense, the other teams’ll figure out real quick that they don’t need to guard you and they’ll go double-team Kate or whoever has a hot hand. Then we’re playing four on five. Can’t win like that. And these big tournaments we’re heading into, we get into the second day, it’s win or go home.”

  I rubbed my hands up and down the sides of my shorts but didn’t say anything.

  “You understand what I’m saying?” Coach said. “If you won’t compete, you’re letting your teammates down, and I can’t put you on the floor. You’ll be spending all your time on the bench next to me. That what you want?”

  I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. “No.”

  “All right, then.” Coach shifted his bag to his other shoulder, opened a side zipper, and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. “Club ball is a big step up from county league. Can’t play the same way you always played. Seems like you’ve figured that out. So now you need to take the next step. You remember at the first practice I talked about John Wooden? Remember who he was?”

  I nodded. “The UCLA coach.”

  “Right. So I want you to listen hard to what he said. ‘Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.’”

  I stared up at him. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Think about it.” Coach waved at Mom again. “‘Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.’” He patted my shoulder and put on his sunglasses. “See you Tuesday.”

  I stood there, watching him walk away, until Mom tooted the horn again.

  “What was your coach talking to you about?” she said when I got in the car.

  I turned in my seat and tossed my gym bag into the back next to Sam. “Just stuff.”

  Mom pulled out of the parking lot. “Nikki,” she said, glancing at me, “are you enjoying this team?”

  And Sam said, “How come you didn’t score any baskets?”

  And for once, I was glad Kate’s dad was one of the parents watching our game, because instead of answering Mom and Sam, which I really, really, really didn’t want to do, I said, “Wow, Mr. Nyquist sure got mad about the other coach wanting to see those birth certificates.”

  “That man is unhinged,” Mom said. “Does he always act like that?”

  And Sam said, “Whose dad is he?”

  So we talked about Mr. Nyquist and Kate and basketball scholarships and stuff like that all the way home, and I didn’t have to say anything about Coach benching me if I didn’t start playing better.

  That didn’t stop me from thinking about it, though.

  Mia Takes On LeBron

  On Sunday morning I woke up to the smell of pancakes, which is the most wonderful smell in the entire world to wake up to, and it would have made the morning perfect if I hadn’t also woken up with the same thought I’d gone to bed with the night before: What if Coach benches me?

  “Oh good, you’re up,” Mom said when I padded into the kitchen. She got up from the kitchen table, where she’d been reading—big surprise—and turned on the stove. “Sam has a soccer game this morning, so we need to leave soon. I was thinking I might have to put the pancake batter in the refrigerator and let you make your own pancakes when you got up.”

  “I can make them if you need to get ready.”

  “I have a little time yet,” Mom said.

  I got a glass of juice and stood next to her while she poured pancake batter into the pan. I loved seeing the little bubbles pop on the surface of the batter, so I kept standing there, watching. But I wasn’t really thinking about pancakes. I was thinking about my talk with Coach.

  “Mom,” I said, “you know when I got in the car after the games yesterday you asked if I was enjoying playing on the Action?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Mom slid a spatula under the pancakes and flipped them.

  “Why’d you ask that?”

  She turned but didn’t say anything for a minute, just looked at me with her worry lines creasing her forehead. Finally she said, “Nikki, I’ve always loved watching you play basketball, because you look so happy when you’re playing.” She rubbed at her worry lines. “No, not just happy. Joyous. You’ve always looked like baske
tball filled you with joy. But that’s not the girl I saw on the court yesterday.” She reached over and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Yesterday I saw a girl who didn’t look happy at all.”

  I bit down on my bottom lip and willed myself not to tear up.

  “Is your coach mean to you girls?” Mom asked. “Does he yell at you when the parents aren’t around?”

  I shook my head. “No. He pushes us to play better and he tells us if we’re doing something wrong, but he doesn’t yell at us.”

  “The girls, then? Is someone bullying you?”

  “No. Well, JJ’s kind of mean, but it’s just because she plays rough. And she’s rough to everybody, not just to me.”

  Mom picked up her big coffee cup—the one Sam and I gave her that had ASK A LIBRARIAN—SHE’LL FIND THE ANSWER printed on the side—and poured more coffee into it. “What about you and Adria? I noticed her spending a lot of time with that tall girl. Did you two have a falling-out?”

  I stared at the floor and didn’t say anything.

  “I think that answers my question.”

  I sighed. “It’s not really a falling-out. It’s just, well, Adria and Kate are going to an extra training class together and hanging out at Adria’s after school sometimes, and I can’t go over to Adria’s, because, you know, I have to take care of Sam.” I poked my finger at a pancake. “And Adria said some things that made me mad. I don’t know. It sounds kind of dumb when I talk about it like this.”

  “No, it sounds like you’re missing your friend.” Mom patted my arm, then slid the pancakes onto a plate and handed it to me. “But you and Adria have been friends for so long, I’m sure you’ll work it out.”

  I sat down to eat, hoping she was right.

  “In any case,” Mom said, “though I’m sorry you and Adria are having trouble, I’m glad it’s not the team that’s bothering you. You’re working so hard in practice. You’re sacrificing all your free time.” She poured more batter into the pan. “I’d hate to think you weren’t happy on this team.”