Once stretching and drill work were over, the players were again divided into two teams—with one player watching from the sidelines. Jeff wasn’t the least bit surprised to find that player was him.
He got even fewer chances to see the field than he had the previous week. The only reason he got in at all, he suspected, was that Coach C would wave him in to sub for someone when that player looked winded.
He managed to make a couple of good plays on defense, then made what he thought was a pretty good nutmeg move with the ball, dribbling it in between Taylor Jackson’s legs and then going past the defender to recover the ball and keep going.
He had open field in front of him when he heard a sharp whistle. He stopped and turned to see Coach J walking in his direction, hands on hips, whistle in his mouth.
“Michaels, if you want to showboat, you can go play in the schoolyard someplace,” he said. “Or maybe show off your skills on TV. But on my team, you just play soccer. Understood?”
Arlow was constantly making what could be called showboat moves, and the coach had never called him on it. But Jeff wasn’t Arlow.
“Understood,” he said.
“Understood what?” Coach J roared.
It took Jeff a split second, then he got it. “Understood, sir,” he said.
Coach J turned and walked away. “Blue team, bring it in,” he said. Jeff—of course—was playing on the white team.
Then he blew his whistle again. “Diskin,” he said to Danny Diskin, who was on the sideline at that moment. “Go for Michaels.”
The thought of just walking off the field crossed Jeff’s mind, but he decided against it: Why give the geology teacher an excuse to throw him off the team? If Coach J was going to do it anyway, fine, but Jeff wasn’t going to make it easy for him.
At the end of practice, Coach J made them sprint the length of the field and back and then jog to midfield, where he and Coach C were waiting. Their field was not quite the full hundred-yard stretch of a regulation soccer pitch. But to Jeff, wind sprints made it feel twice as long after he’d been chasing down balls all afternoon.
That hadn’t been a problem today.
“Okay, boys, good job out there,” Coach J said. “We play here tomorrow at three thirty. That gives you forty-five minutes from the end of school to kickoff. Get to the locker room right away, change, and get out here, and we’ll get you stretched out and warmed up.”
He paused, and Jeff thought the day was mercifully over. It wasn’t.
“One more thing, and listen up because this is important. For a lot of you this is your first experience with an organized team—emphasis on the word team. If you want to be part of a good team and also a good teammate, you remember always that you and your ego are no longer important. You do what’s best for the team. You don’t talk about team issues outside the locker room. What happens in the locker room or out here stays in the locker room and out here. Period.”
He looked directly at Jeff. “Everyone understand?”
They all answered, “Yes, sir!” with Jeff barely moving his lips.
Coach J noticed.
“I said, do you understand—Michaels?”
“Yes, sir!” Jeff said in as loud a voice as he could muster.
“Okay then. Arlow, you’re the team captain. Get everyone in for a cheer.”
Arlow smirked, looked directly at Jeff, and moved to the middle of the huddle, his hand in the air. Everyone surrounded him.
“Team first!” Arlow said.
Everyone put their hands in and repeated, “Team first!”
They started toward the locker room, Jeff moving at a quick jog. The faster he got out of there, he figured, the better.
Ray Didinger’s column was up on the NBC Sports–Philly website by the time Jeff got home.
His dad had texted him to tell him Didinger had finished writing it, so Jeff went straight to his computer to check it out.
Didinger pulled no punches.
“Andi Carillo is a talented eleven-year-old soccer player,” it began.
She’s in the sixth grade at Merion Middle School and wants to play on the sixth-grade soccer team. But as of right now, she can’t, because the team’s coach, Hal Johnston, doesn’t want any girls on his team.
“No one ever said this was a boys-only team,” Andi’s father, Tony Carillo, said on Monday. “Presumably the best fifteen players—regardless of sex—would be selected for the team. That didn’t happen.”
No one is disputing that Andi deserved a spot on the team based on her ability to play the game. What Johnston is apparently telling people is that he cut Andi because he thinks it would be bad for the morale of the boys on the team to play with a girl who is better than they are.
I say “apparently,” because Johnston didn’t return a phone call, or an email as of this writing. It was left to the school’s principal Arthur L. Block to defend his coach … sort of.
“Coach Johnston felt that boys should be on the soccer team and girls on the field hockey team,” Block said. “I told him there was nothing in my mind that prevented Miss Carillo from trying out for the soccer team. He agreed to allow her to try out but insisted that, as coach, he should have final say on who made the team. I agreed to that.”
I asked Block if he now thought that had been a mistake. There was a long pause. “Whether it was a mistake or not, I made a commitment to a coach who is being paid almost nothing to do a job that’s important to the school,” he finally said. “So I feel I need to stand by that decision and by the coach.”
Block’s heart appears to be in the right place. He doesn’t want to break his word. But Johnston broke a commitment he made when he agreed to coach the team—spoken or unspoken. That was his commitment to give every kid a fair chance to make the team and to play for the team. Clearly he never intended to give Andi Carillo a fair chance.
The rest of the column had details about Andi and her family before it circled back to Didinger’s conclusion.
The question of girls competing with boys dates to the 1970s. Girls have proven over and over again—Mo’ne Davis, anyone?—that they can compete with boys. It is heartbreaking in the year 2019 that there are still coaches who can justify this sort of segregation.
Next year will mark the one hundredth anniversary of women being given the right to vote. It would be nice if someone would wake Hal Johnston up to the fact that his way of thinking has been outdated for just about that long.
Jeff reread the whole thing again from beginning to end, then walked into the kitchen and told his mom to call it up on her computer. When she was finished, she smiled and said, “Well, that should get people’s attention.”
She was right. Jeff’s dad walked in an hour later with a big smile on his face.
“Ray’s column drew two-thirds as many hits in the first hour as the Eagles column he wrote last night,” he said. “That’s completely unheard of. Even the newsroom know-nothings couldn’t ignore that.”
“Are people talking about it? What are they saying?” Jeff asked eagerly.
His dad shrugged. “You know how the Internet can be. The comments section has some jerks, for sure. But seems like a lot of folks—most of the ones I’m seeing, at least—are really rooting for Andi and are outraged by the coach’s attitude.”
“So what now?” Jeff asked.
“Well, I will be at the game tomorrow with a crew. We’ll interview Andi and her parents beforehand and see how Johnston chooses to handle himself after the game. If he tries to duck us, he’s going to embarrass himself on camera.”
“You think other media might show up?” Jeff’s mom asked.
“Possible,” his dad said. “Ray being the writer definitely gives it a lot more weight.” He smiled. “Selfishly, I hope not. I’d like to have first crack at the story.”
“Second crack,” Jeff said.
“First TV crack,” his dad said.
They both laughed. The next day would be interesting—regardless of the outcome of the game.