Benchwarmers Page 3

  Block had laughed—which annoyed Johnston.

  “Hal,” he said, leaning forward, surprising him by using his first name. “We’re talking about sixth-grade soccer, not the World Cup.”

  That comment annoyed Johnston. “Are we keeping score in these games? Is one team going to win and the other going to lose?”

  “Sixth-grade soccer,” Block repeated.

  “You gave me your word I’d have final say.”

  For a moment the principal was silent. Then he said, “Yes, I did. Of course, I did so on the presumption that you would give the girl a fair shot to make the team. I’m guessing you had decided to cut her regardless of what you saw before the tryouts began.”

  “I cut her because I thought it was the right thing to do for the fifteen boys who made the team,” Johnston said.

  He remembered a famous line from one of the Star Trek movies just in time to quote it to Block. “‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few … Or the one.’”

  Block stood up. “Wrath of Khan,” he said, surprising his teacher. “A great line. I just don’t think it fits here.”

  Johnston turned and walked out, not bothering to say anything more.

  He assumed the Carillo family would protest in some form. Coach C had told him the girl’s parents were lawyers. That could lead to some kind of legal move to force him to put her on the team. That was fine, too. A coach doing what was best for his team was hardly legal grounds to force him to change his roster.

  If worst came to worst, he’d add her as a sixteenth player and let her sit on the bench. Not ideal, but if the boys understood she was there because a judge said she had to be, they might even be inspired to play better to stand up for the coach who had stood up for them.

  “Win-win,” he murmured to himself as he pushed open the door to the teachers’ lounge. He couldn’t stop smiling.

  * * *

  Andi’s parents were waiting for her when she got home from school. Her mom had left work early to pick up her dad at the airport. Her dad looked pretty beat. He had been in Boston for the start of what would be a long trial involving one of his firm’s corporate clients.

  The three of them sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Well, Andi, what do you want to do?” her dad said after getting some more details from his daughter. “Your mom and I talked, and we could go to court, but the odds are probably against us unless this coach admits you never had a chance to make the team because you’re a girl.”

  “He basically said that to me,” Andi said.

  “Chances are he won’t say it in court,” her mom said. “I did a little research. The cases where judges have ordered that girls be given a chance have almost always involved being allowed to try out. You were allowed to try out.”

  “Even if I never had a chance,” Andi said.

  “The coach is no dummy,” her dad said. “He let you try out, even if it was under his boss’s orders, so in a legal sense he can claim you were given a fair chance.”

  “But I wasn’t…”

  Her dad held up a hand.

  “Of course you weren’t,” he said. “And I’m sure everyone who watched the tryouts knows that. But in a legal sense it’s much harder to prove. I would say our chances in court would be fifty-fifty—at best.”

  Andi felt pretty crushed.

  She sat back in her chair, shaking her head in frustration. She looked at her mother, who clearly read her thoughts.

  “Tony, there has to be some way to keep this from happening,” her mom said. “Forget the legalities; this is about right and wrong, and what’s happening here is just flat-out wrong.”

  “I know that, Jeannie,” he said. “It’s mind-blowing to me that this guy would do this to an eleven-year-old kid.”

  “I’ll bet if they took a vote, most of the guys would want me on the team,” Andi said. “By the end of tryouts there were only two or three of them still acting like jerks.”

  There was silence at the table for a moment. Her father finally stood up, went to the refrigerator, and took out a bottle of water.

  “I honestly don’t know what to do next,” he said. “We can go to Block, I guess, but it doesn’t sound like he’s in a position to help at this point. We need a way to force people to pay attention to this.”

  Andi sat up in her chair, feeling the heaviness that had settled in her chest start to lift.

  “Dad,” she said, “that’s it! We do know somebody who can do that.”

  She stood up and walked from the kitchen, pulling her phone from her pocket. She knew what to do next.

  6

  Jeff Michaels hadn’t really enjoyed his first practice as a full-fledged member of the Merion sixth-grade soccer team.

  Coach J had given them a rah-rah speech before practice started about how proud he was of all of them for earning their spots on the team. He had named Ron Arlow team captain without explanation, since everyone knew it was because he was the best player.

  There was no mention of Andi Carillo—which was no surprise to Jeff.

  Practice began, and when it was time to scrimmage, the two coaches split the team into groups of seven—with one player designated to substitute for both teams.

  That player was Jeff.

  The message was clear: In the minds of the coaches, he was the fifteenth player on a fifteen-man team. He could live with not being one of the starters once the games began, but he thought he was better than a number of the other guys.

  Apparently the coaches disagreed.

  When Jeff did get in, it took Arlow about thirty seconds to gather up a loose ball and charge directly at him. Arlow didn’t make any move to go around him, just dribbled the ball right at him, as if to run him over.

  Jeff froze. Suddenly Arlow faked left, then darted to his right and went around him as if he were a statue, Jeff diving at him much too late.

  No one came to help him up. On the next whistle, he was back on the sideline.

  Things went better on his second chance to get on the field. Danny Diskin broke down the middle and slid a pass to him. Jeff trapped it with the outside of his left foot and looked up to see Reed Whitlow charging at him. This time he didn’t panic: He waited until Whitlow was almost on top of him, then feinted left and pushed the ball right with the inside of his foot, faking out Whitlow and racing past him to pick up the ball.

  It was, Jeff thought, a pretty nifty move, and a couple of guys said so.

  He held his own during his few moments on the field after that, even getting in briefly with Arlow’s team and setting him up for one of the forty-three goals he scored during the practice.

  Actually, it was more like five goals, but it felt like forty-three to Jeff.

  After practice, Coach J reminded them that their first game would be the following Tuesday at home against Ben Franklin Academy, a private school and not a league game. They would get their uniforms on Monday and were told they needed to go out and get proper soccer cleats over the weekend. Some players already had soccer shoes. Jeff had been wearing sneakers.

  “No spikes,” Coach C warned. “They aren’t legal in this league.”

  Jeff had showered and dressed and was walking out of the locker room when he checked the cell phone his parents had finally allowed him to have at the start of the school year. He’d spent most of fifth grade begging for a phone because all his classmates already had one. Okay, some of his classmates already had one.

  His heart skipped a beat when he saw a text message from a number he recognized right away: Andi Carillo’s.

  Can u meet me in cafeteria before school starts in AM?

  He texted right back: OK. 8:15?

  That would give them fifteen minutes before the bell.

  Great. See u then. Thx.

  He wondered what she wanted to talk about—the soccer team, no doubt—but why him?

  When he got home, he turned on the television. On NBC Sports–Philly, SportsNite had just started and the host was i
ntroducing a feature story he knew his father had been working on for a while about Saint Joseph’s basketball coach Phil Martelli—who was getting ready to start his twenty-fifth season as the Hawks’ coach.

  Martelli was one of the more colorful characters in college basketball, a guy who would say almost anything and get away with it because he was such a good coach.

  “What do you like most about being a coach?” his dad asked Martelli on camera.

  “Winning,” Martelli said without hesitation. Jeff started to roll his eyes, but then Martelli continued. “And the thing I like second most is losing. It’s all about competing, about being in that arena for forty minutes. All I’ve ever asked my players for is the chance to compete. If they give me that, I’m happy—regardless of the outcome.”

  Jeff thought that was a great answer, especially from such a successful coach. It was all Jeff wanted when it came to playing for Coach J and Coach C. He’d earned it but wasn’t sure he was really going to get it. And all Andi wanted was the same thing. She’d earned it and was now being denied it.

  He looked back at the screen, where his dad and Martelli were walking across the Saint Joseph’s basketball court, talking to each other about why Martelli loved basketball in Philadelphia so much.

  Martelli was talking again as his dad’s story began to wrap up. “I can honestly say I’ve never worried about what the media thinks of the job I’m doing or what the fans think about the job I’m doing,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I get along with the media so well. I never take it personally when they criticize me. All I want is for my players to think I’m doing a good job and to look in the mirror at night and believe I’ve done the best job I can possibly do—every single day.”

  The shot of Martelli dissolved to one of him cutting down and waving a net in victory with a big smile on his face.

  “Fair to say,” he heard his father say in a voice-over, “that Martelli’s been happy looking in the mirror for a long time.”

  Then Martelli’s voice was heard again as his players swarmed to hug him on camera. “I love the winning,” he said. “But it’s the competition that I crave.”

  His dad came back on camera one last time. “The season starts November sixth,” he said. “Phil Martelli can’t wait. Tom Michaels for NBC Sports–Philadelphia.”

  Jeff didn’t hear a word the host said when she came back on camera. Andi Carillo deserved the same chance as Phil Martelli, he thought. Maybe his dad could help.

  * * *

  Andi was waiting for Jeff when he walked into the cafeteria a few minutes early the next morning. The massive room was empty except for a couple of the kitchen staff who worked there, beginning their preparations for lunch hour.

  If the presence of two students bothered them, they didn’t show it.

  Andi was sitting in one of the comfortable swivel chairs that the teachers used when they were monitoring the room. There were three of them. Jeff sat down next to her.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said. “This won’t take long, one way or the other.”

  “No problem,” he said. “Anything new?”

  He didn’t have to say “on the soccer team,” because she understood.

  “Not really,” she said. “My dad and mom and I talked about maybe going to court to get an injunction, but they think that’s a fifty-fifty shot at best.”

  “What’s an injunction?” Jeff asked, baffled.

  “It’s when you say that someone is doing something that isn’t allowed under the law and the court orders them to stop. In this case, a judge would have to say that, by law, Johnston can’t keep me off the team.”

  “Can they do that?”

  Andi shrugged. “In theory, I guess. If we can prove keeping me off the team is sexual discrimination, then the court could order him to put me on the team. It’d be the same if he tried to keep Danny or Reed off the team because they’re black, or Max because he’s Jewish.”

  Jeff understood. “But how do you prove that?” he asked.

  “That’s the problem,” she said. “If he says he just did it because he thought his team would be better without me, that he gave me the chance to try out and I wasn’t good enough, then they can’t say he broke the law.”

  “But, clearly, you were good enough.”

  “Proving that might be hard. Even if every boy on the team said it, that wouldn’t necessarily prove it. And, as you know, not everyone would say it.”

  “Arlow and his buddies,” Jeff said.

  “I have an idea, though,” she said.

  “I have one, too,” he said.

  She put up a hand.

  “Hang on, let me finish. Do you think your dad might be willing or able to do a story on this on SportsNite?”

  Jeff grinned. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said.

  7

  The five-minute bell rang just as Andi and Jeff were wrapping up.

  Jeff told Andi that he would speak to his father when he got home from school. Since it was a Friday, his dad would be covering a high school football game that night and would almost certainly be home during the day.

  Andi wondered if his dad might be able to do something before the opening game on Tuesday. Jeff had no idea. He didn’t even know if his dad would be able to do a story at all.

  “Things have changed there in the last year or so,” Jeff explained. “Before, Dad’s bosses let him do pretty much any story he wanted to and this was the kind of story he liked doing. Now, though, everything is focused on the Eagles, Phillies, Sixers, and Flyers. He did a story on Phil Martelli last night, and he told me he had to fight to get them to let him do that.”

  “Why?” Andi asked.

  “The way Dad tells it, they’re more concerned with people clicking on their website than anything else. The Eagles get the most clicks—by far. Then the other pro teams. Then high school football—which he actually still enjoys. After all of that, college basketball. Maybe.”

  Jeff had asked his dad earlier that summer why he didn’t do more stories about the Philadelphia Union. He liked reading online stories about the players, who came from different countries and backgrounds, but never saw much beyond a score and a highlight or two when he turned on his dad’s station.

  “The world’s most popular sport is still a niche sport here in the city,” his father had explained. “That means there’s a small group of people who love soccer in this town. But they can’t begin to compete with the other pro teams for clicks.”

  Jeff promised to report back to Andi as soon as he had talked to his dad. There was no soccer practice that afternoon because the team would be playing games on the next several Fridays and Coach J had decided to give the team the day off to get an early start on the weekend.

  Jeff had actually been a little disappointed. He felt as though he had made progress in practice and wanted the chance to show the coaches he deserved some playing time once the games began. He knew he wasn’t going to start on Tuesday, but he was hoping to get into the game for more than the five minutes every player was required to play under league rules.

  * * *

  Catching up on some homework in the library at lunch, Jeff texted his dad to see if there was any way he could pick him up at school instead of having him ride the bus. His mom, he knew, was at work.

  Anything wrong? his dad texted back.

  No. Just would like to see you.

  Usual spot @ 2:45.

  Jeff’s dad was waiting for him around the corner from the front entrance to the school when Jeff walked out. This was their designated spot when either of his parents came to pick him up.

  “Okay, so what do you want to talk to me about?” his dad said as Jeff tossed his backpack into the back seat and slid into the front.

  “How did you know?” Jeff said as his father pulled away from the curb.

  His dad smiled. Jeff had inherited his curly dark hair and, according to his mother, his smile.

  “You enjoy riding the bus most days,
” his dad said. “You like hanging out with your friends—especially on a Friday. So if you ask me to come pick you up, something must be on your mind.”

  There were times when Jeff forgot that his parents were both pretty smart.

  “Yeah, well, there is something,” he said.

  “Fire away,” his dad said.

  “There’s this girl, Dad, named Andi Carillo,” he started.

  He saw his father grinning and could almost see his eyes brighten—even though he was wearing sunglasses.

  “No, it’s not that,” Jeff said quickly. “I mean, she’s pretty amazing, but that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Okay then, what is it?” his dad asked.

  Jeff began at the beginning and told him the whole story, finishing just as they turned into the driveway with Andi being left off the team.

  It was a warm, humid mid-September afternoon, and they paused while his father checked the sky for any sign of rain before walking into the house. Once inside, they headed straight for the kitchen. His dad pulled two Cokes from the refrigerator and handed one to Jeff. They sat down across from each other at the kitchen island.

  Jeff had explained as they got out of the car that Andi’s lawyer parents thought her chances of getting some kind of court order to let her play weren’t great.

  “They’re probably right about the court order,” his dad said, sipping his soda. “So let me guess. You want me to do a story on this—embarrass the coach.”

  Jeff took a long sip of his drink, put it down, and nodded. “It’s not fair, Dad, and he shouldn’t get away with it…”

  His dad put up a hand to stop him.

  “I don’t disagree, son. I just don’t honestly know if I can get my bosses to invest my time and their resources into a story about sixth-grade soccer.”

  “The click thing.”

  His dad nodded. “Yes, the click thing.”