The Nine Girls in the Old Gym

The practices

By Christmas we had a team, though I would not have bet a nickel on it. Hailey was still slow off her first step, but she had learned to get position under the basket and to use her height like a closed door.

I bought nine gray T-shirts at the farm store in Marlow, four dollars each, plain cotton, and wrote the numbers on the front with a black marker. That was the uniform. We would wash them in the old school laundry sink if we had to.

My father said nothing. After every practice he wrote the date on a legal pad, and under it, in pencil, the first names of all nine girls. I never asked him why.

The Saturday in January

The county tournament is the second Saturday in January, held at the high school gym in Marlow, the county seat. It is a small thing, if you do not live here. If you do, it is the whole winter.

We drew a bracket I had to look at twice. Greg’s team, which had won the county three years running, was seeded first. We were seeded eighth, because we had not played anyone to be seeded by.

I will not tell you every game. We won the first by four, scraping out a lead in the last minute when Sadie stole an inbound pass and found Lily in the corner.

We won the second by nine. By the third, the Lions Club cook was asking who we were.

The championship game was at four o’clock that Saturday, us against Greg.

I want to tell you what I saw when the bleachers filled. I saw my father at the scorer’s table with his stopwatch, because the tournament official had let him sit there since the first game.

I saw Pat from Garber with a casserole dish on her lap, driven twelve miles by her husband.

I saw Adele, Greg’s mother, sitting alone on the home side with a purse in her lap, and I saw the families of the eight girls, who had come in pickups and minivans and borrowed cars, and who sat together in a long gray row.

Greg’s team came out in navy warmups with the name of the implement dealer printed across the back, Hartman Implement of Marlow, in white block letters. Their ball bags matched. Their shoes matched. Madison was number twelve, and she looked small.

The first half

I do not remember exactly what I said in the huddle before tip-off.

I know I knelt, because my knees have never been good and I get down to a girl’s eye level when I need her to hear me. I know I said something plain.

“We are not here to beat him,” I said. “We are here to play the way we have played every Tuesday. We talk. We pass. We get to the open spot before they do. Everything else is noise.”

Lily put her hand into the middle. Then Hailey’s came down on it, then Sadie’s, then Bree’s, and nine hands stacked up in the air of the Marlow gym, and the whistle blew, and my father clicked his stopwatch.

By halftime we were down six. In the corner of the visiting locker room, which was really a storage closet with a bench, Hailey sat with a towel over her head and her elbows on her knees.

“I can’t catch her,” she said, from inside the towel. I knew who she meant. It was their point guard, a girl named Taylor, quick as a minnow. “I just can’t.”

I sat down next to her. “You don’t have to catch her.”

She pulled the towel back. Her eyes were red but dry.

“You have to get there first,” I said. “When she goes right, you are already standing where she’s going. You know where she goes. You have watched her all day.”

“She goes right.”

“Every time. Be there.”

Hailey looked at me. Then she looked at the cinder-block wall, thinking, the way she did in practice when I gave her something to carry. Then she put the towel down on the bench and stood up.