Hal Johnston wasn’t surprised when Andi Carillo didn’t show up to talk to him at lunchtime. He waited in his classroom an extra ten minutes to make sure she wasn’t coming before heading to the faculty lounge, where almost everyone on the staff ate lunch.
He guessed that, just as she had done before, Carillo would go to Block, to complain about being cut from the team.
He smiled at the thought. He had anticipated that move and had gone to see the principal early that morning to tell him that he had decided to cut the girl and why.
“She’s definitely one of the best fifteen players who tried out,” he had explained. “In fact, based purely on her skills, she’d start as one of the forwards. But I have to put together the best possible team, and I think the presence of a girl will be divisive. It will be especially tough for boys not as good as she is to handle.”
He’d thought this through. He didn’t really have anything against the kid. But he simply didn’t believe in coed sports teams. Boys should compete against boys; girls against girls.
If that made him old-fashioned, so be it.
Johnston figured Block probably wasn’t yet forty, which made him at least ten years younger than the coach.
Which might have been why he wasn’t surprised when Block had furrowed his brow before answering.
“Mr. Johnston, we’re almost two decades into the twenty-first century,” he said. “Boys playing on the same team with girls is nothing new. If she deserves to be on the team, she deserves to be on the team. Period.”
Johnston had been expecting him to say that. “Mr. Block, when I agreed to let her try out it was on the promise, from you, that I have final say as coach as to which fifteen players would give us the best team. This gives us the best team, regardless of talent level.”
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.