When Andi walked onto the practice field on Wednesday, several of the boys who were already out there stopped to clap for her and came over to welcome her back.
Arlow gave her a wave but continued loosening up with his pals Mark and Ethan. That was fine with Andi. The fact that they seemed to have accepted her as someone who could help the team was enough.
Practice was routine, although Andi—again—spent time with the second unit. She had thought those days were over, but for some reason Coach J had decided her absence from practice Tuesday was an excuse to limit her—at least in practice.
Coach C had called on Tuesday night to make certain there had been no setbacks and to be sure she’d be able to practice on Wednesday.
“Don’t be too surprised if Coach J limits you a little bit,” he had said. “Part of it is, he wants you to be careful. The other part of it you probably understand.”
Andi was tempted to ask him to elaborate but decided there was no point.
They didn’t practice for very long on Wednesday, and Coach J said that practice Thursday was optional, since he knew some of them had papers to finish and tests on Friday.
“We aren’t going to do all that much anyway,” he said. “Rest is as important as practice at this point in the season. Plus, I don’t want some teacher telling me next week that one of you is flunking a subject and you can’t play in one or both of our last two games. So only come tomorrow if you’re comfortable you are in good shape with your schoolwork.”
They all nodded and listened, and then everyone showed up on Thursday. The season would be over a week from Friday—unless they somehow won the conference and got to play one extra game. No one wanted to miss a practice. It proved sixth-grade schoolwork wasn’t that hard, Andi mused, voicing that thought to Jeff and Mike Craig as they walked off the practice field.
“Even for Arlow,” she added.
They both laughed.
Andi wondered if she’d be in the starting lineup the next day or if Coach J would be up to his old tricks of keeping her on the bench until she was really needed.
Jeff provided the answer when they went out to warm up the next day, the coldest of the year so far. Halloween and the end of daylight saving time were a little more than two weeks away and Andi could already feel winter closing in. She hated the end of daylight saving time—the sun setting before five o’clock. It just felt so dark.
“Same starters as the Cynwyd game,” Jeff told her. “I guess Coach knows there’s no time to mess around with his silly biases right now.”
As expected, Blue Bell was a tough out. Like Merion, Blue Bell had one girl on the team. Unlike Andi, she played on defense, which meant that she and Andi came face-to-face with each other on a number of occasions.
They shook hands and introduced themselves just before kickoff—Andi glancing over her shoulder to make sure Coach J wasn’t watching.
“Carrie O’Shea,” the girl from Blue Bell said. “I’ve followed your story. I admire what you’ve done.”
“No such craziness on your side?” Andi asked.
Carrie smiled. “None,” she said. “It helps that my mom is the assistant coach.”
They both laughed. Andi hadn’t noticed that one of the Blue Bell coaches was a woman. Now she did.
The first half was scoreless. Each goalie made one great save. The Blue Bell goalie’s save was on Andi, who had gotten a pretty lead pass from Arlow and cut into the box, Carrie O’Shea step for step with her. Andi pulled up, cut outside to clear space, and fired a shot she thought was headed for the corner.
But the goalie took a quick step, jumped, and managed to deflect the ball just over the top of the goal.
At halftime Coach J told them he was going to try something a little different in terms of subbing. Every player had to be on the field for at least five minutes and every player had to be off for at least five minutes.
Instead of taking the team’s best players out one at a time, he decided to gamble and take the entire front line—Arlow, Andi, and Craig—out to start the half. His thinking, he said, was that Merion would just play to keep the score tied, and then the trio would come in with a few extra minutes of rest and jump-start the offense.
It sounded good in theory until Danny Diskin, perhaps a little overamped knowing his team needed to keep the score at 0–0, took down a Blue Bell player in the penalty box, leading to a penalty kick.
Blue Bell was the first team Merion had played whose players had their names on the back of their uniforms. It turned out that one of the parents worked for a company that sold sports gear and he’d gotten the uniforms custom-made.
As a result, watching from the bench with Arlow and Craig, Andi knew that the player Diskin had taken down was named Gibbons. He slammed the penalty kick past Bobby Woodward and, three minutes into the half, Blue Bell led, 1–0.
“Well, that strategy worked out well,” Arlow said as the players came up the field for the kickoff.
“We have to wait two more minutes before we go back in,” Craig said.
“He could put us back in now, then take us out for two minutes later,” Andi said.
The conference assigned someone from a neutral school to every game to keep track of who was playing and who wasn’t. She wondered if Coach J might try to get them back in a little earlier—take a chance on whether it would be noticed—but he wasn’t looking in their direction.
“We’ll just have to figure out a way to score twice when we get back in there,” Craig said. “Simple as that.”
Only it wasn’t as simple as that. As if determined to make up for his mistake, Danny Diskin took off on a run down the right side after the kickoff, with Jeff racing alongside, closer to the middle of the field. Diskin dodged a Blue Bell player named Shuck with a sweet kick between the defender’s legs and tapped a pass to Jeff, who looked like he was going to blast a shot from just outside the penalty area.
At the last possible second, though, Jeff pushed the ball left, to where Mark Adkins, playing up front in Andi’s spot, had been left wide-open. The goalie had moved to his left in anticipation of Jeff’s shot. Now, he dived back in the other direction, but was a split second late. Adkins’s shot didn’t have much on it, but he was close enough to the goal and open enough that it slid just past the keeper’s reach and into the net.
Andi was stunned, not just that they had scored, but the way they’d scored. Jeff’s improvement as a player from the tryouts until now was amazing. What’s more, she’d have bet money that Adkins wouldn’t have been able to find the net—even from five feet away. But he had.
Remarkably, the game was tied at one all. It had taken less than a minute for Merion to tie the score.
“Well,” Arlow said, “I guess Coach did know what he was doing.”
They all laughed.
Two minutes later, there was a dead ball and Coach J waved all three of them back into the game.
“It’s up to us now,” Craig said as they jogged onto the field, high-fiving the three players coming out.
Andi nodded. He was right. There were no excuses now. If they wanted any shot at a conference title, they had to figure out a way to win this game.