Basketball Disasters Read online

  “Come on up for our morning huddle,” Coach Joe told the class.

  Mason and Brody found places next to each other on the football-shaped rug by Coach Joe’s stool, as they always did. Nora sat with them, too. Nora was also tall. In her case, it probably did mean that she’d be good at basketball. Mason didn’t know if the fourth-grade teams were mixed boys and girls, or if boys and girls played in separate leagues.

  There was a lot he didn’t know about basketball.

  And wasn’t looking forward to finding out.

  As usual, Mason and Brody had chosen a spot as far away as possible from Dunk Davis. Dunk was built like a football player, not a basketball player. Mason hoped that Dunk wouldn’t be playing basketball at the Y, but Dunk played every sport known to man, plus a few of his own invention, such as “throw a basketball at Brody’s head” and “throw a football at Mason’s stomach.” And a boy named Dunk might well go out for a sport that involved dunking.

  “All right, team,” Coach Joe said, once everybody had settled down. “We’re starting a new unit in social studies this week, a brand-new ball game. Now that we’ve studied Native Americans and the age of exploration, we’re going to move into the colonial period. And for language arts, we’ll focus on factual writing, with each of you writing a report on a famous figure of the American Revolution.”

  Nora’s face brightened. Mason knew that Nora loved facts.

  “We’re going to be learning about everyday life in the thirteen colonies: what folks wore, what they ate, what they did for fun. And we’ll have Colonial School Day and run our class the way they would have done it in 1750.”

  He paused for effect, his eyes twinkling with anticipation of what he was going to say next.

  “You’ll have to call me Master Joseph, and naughty boys and girls will wear a dunce cap and sit on a stool in the corner.”

  Mason couldn’t tell if Coach Joe was joking or not. He was pretty sure he’d be safe from the dunce cap. But in 1750, Dunk would have been sitting on that stool in the corner all day long.

  “All right, team,” Coach Joe dismissed them. “Back to your desks, and we’ll rewind a few centuries and see what we find.”

  * * *

  Most days Mason and Brody walked home from school together. Today, as they passed Mr. Taylor’s house, Mason saw a small sign placed on the edge of the lawn.

  It said NO DOGS.

  In case a dog couldn’t read, the sign also had a black silhouette of a dog in a red circle with a red line drawn through it.

  Maybe because of his name, the sign seemed to be directed specifically at Dog, like a sign saying NO MASONS or NO BRODYS, complete with a crossed-out caricature of their faces.

  “She hasn’t even met Dog yet!” Mason burst out. “He hasn’t done anything to her!”

  On Dog’s walk yesterday evening, Mason had been careful to go in the opposite direction, so Dog hadn’t so much as stepped on the sidewalk by the Taylors’ house.

  Even Brody looked troubled by the unfairness of this unprovoked ban on any and all dogs, however wonderful. But then he said, “Well, that explains it. She thinks she doesn’t like dogs because she hasn’t met our Dog.”

  Mason shook his head. “She’s not going to change,” he predicted darkly.

  “You changed,” Brody pointed out.

  “That was different. Besides, I did like Dog from the start. I just didn’t know it.”

  “Maybe she just doesn’t know it.”

  Now Mason was getting angry. He was nothing like a crabby, nasty-tempered, dog-hating, witchy old lady.

  “Maybe I’ll put a sign on my yard. It’ll say NO OLD LADIES. And I’ll put a picture of a cane in a red circle with a big red line through it.”

  Brody looked shocked. “Mason!”

  “Okay, okay, I won’t put the cane.” His parents would never let him display a sign like that, anyway. His mother hated what she called stereotypes of people—prejudiced views of somebody based on their race or sex or age.

  But didn’t Mrs. Taylor have a stereotyped, prejudiced view of Dog based on his species?

  From the corner of his eye, Mason saw some movement at one of the upper windows of the Taylor house.

  “Don’t look now,” he told Brody in a low voice, “but somebody is spying on us.”

  “Mrs. Taylor?” Brody looked up, of course, even though Mason had just told him not to.

  “Who else?” Mason muttered. “Come on, Brody, let’s go home and see Dog. Our Dog of Greatness.”

  “Don’t tell Dog about Mrs. Taylor, okay?” Brody said.

  “Okay,” Mason agreed.

  But he had a feeling Dog would find out about Mrs. Taylor soon enough.

  * * *

  On Thursday morning at breakfast, as Mason was eating his plain Cheerios with milk, his mother said, “I got an email. There’s a meeting at the Y tonight for all kids who are doing basketball, along with their parents.”

  “Do we have to go?” Mason asked.

  “Of course!”

  “Do you and I both have to go?” Mason’s dad asked her.

  “Along with their parents,” she repeated, with emphasis on the s at the end of the word. “Honestly, Dan. Sometimes you’re as bad as Mason!”

  Then she stopped herself, as if remembering that you were supposed to avoid labeling your child—not to mention his father—in that way.

  “It’s going to be fun! We can find out if any of your other friends are on your team. And who your coach is going to be! Maybe they’ll hand out your T-shirts.”

  Yes, and then she’d want Mason to put his on so she could take a picture of him to send to all the relatives: See, Mason is doing a team sport at last! And great would be the rejoicing throughout the land.

  Then Mason remembered that he was supposedly the one who had wanted to sign up to do basketball, that doing basketball had supposedly been all his own idea.

  “Oh, goody,” Mason said.

  On the way to school that morning, Mason and Brody passed the NO DOGS sign on the Taylors’ lawn. So far Mason had resisted the temptation to let Dog pee on the Taylors’ lawn. Mason scowled up at the upstairs window in case any dog-haters were spying again today.

  That afternoon, after math time, one of the parent helpers—Emma Averill’s mom—came to their class to help do a colonial craft with Coach Joe’s class. Coach Joe had told them they’d be doing a different colonial craft every Thursday.

  This week the craft was making pomander balls. Mason had never heard of pomander balls, but apparently they were wildly popular in the thirteen colonies.

  To make a pomander ball, you took an orange, stuck it full of cloves, and rolled it in cinnamon.

  “And then,” Emma’s mom said, “you can put it in your bureau drawer and all your unmentionables will smell so nice.”

  Mason guessed that “unmentionables” were underwear. He would have thought that people in the eighteenth century would have had enough problems—dying of diseases like yellow fever, getting ready to fight King George III for their liberty—without worrying about making their underwear smell nice.

  It was hard forcing a clove into the thick rind of an orange. Already Mason’s thumb was sore from trying.

  “Use a toothpick to make a hole first,” Emma’s mom suggested, offering him one from the small box she had brought with her.

  Mason stabbed his orange with a toothpick. The point of the toothpick broke off.

  Across the room, Dunk seemed to have given up on cloves altogether and was juggling three oranges. The only problem was that Dunk didn’t know how to juggle. All three oranges landed on the floor and rolled under other people’s desks.

  Luckily Coach Joe was in the room, making a pomander ball of his own. “Easy, Dunk,” he said.

  His juggling performance over, Dunk crawled on the floor to retrieve the fruit. Mason couldn’t imagine that Dunk’s pomander ball was going to be an appealing addition to anybody’s underwear drawer.

  Nora ra
ised her hand. “How did people in colonial times get oranges?” she asked. “I mean, they couldn’t buy them at the grocery store. Or grow them, unless they lived in Florida. And Florida wasn’t one of the thirteen colonies.”

  Emma’s mom looked stumped. “Well, I don’t know.”

  “They would have used apples,” Coach Joe said. “Apples grew well in all of the thirteen colonies.”

  “Then why aren’t we using apples?” Nora asked.

  That was a good question. In addition to being more historically accurate, apples had softer skin, so it wouldn’t take two years to insert each clove. The score on Mason’s pomander ball now was orange 5, Mason 0.

  “Most people use oranges or lemons nowadays,” Emma’s mom said. “Because they smell so refreshing—that wonderful citrus aroma. And oranges and lemons last longer.”

  Mason hadn’t known that anybody made pomander balls nowadays. Concern for having nice-smelling underwear must span the centuries.

  He looked over at Nora’s pomander ball. Clever Nora had managed to insert her cloves in neat up-and-down lines that made her orange look sort of like a miniature basketball.

  Brody was already rolling his pomander ball in cinnamon. The last step was to wrap it in a square of fabric and tie it with a red ribbon. Brody gave his finished pomander ball a loving little pat.

  Mason tried to jam another toothpick into his. The toothpick broke off in his hand, of course.

  Orange 6, Mason 0.

  3

  The basketball meeting was held at the Y, in a large gym at the end of a long hallway. Mason could tell by looking around that all basketball players and their families were not in attendance. Only a few families had bothered to come. Mason and his parents sat on the folding chairs next to Brody and his dad.

  “The meeting is really for families new to the Y youth sports programs,” Brody’s dad explained, “or for teams that are just forming, like this one.”

  Mason didn’t recognize any other kids he knew from school. Dunk wasn’t there; maybe that meant Dunk wasn’t doing basketball, or maybe it meant that he was on another team, or maybe his family just hadn’t come to the meeting. Mason couldn’t decide if it would be better to have Dunk on the same team or a different team. Was it better to have Dunk on your side, but see more of him, or have Dunk ready to bounce a basketball off your head, but only once in a while?

  “Do you know who the coach will be?” Mason’s mom asked Brody’s dad.

  “All I know is that it won’t be me,” Brody’s dad said. “I’m already coaching Cammie’s team.”

  “There’s that kid again,” Mason’s mother said, nodding her head toward the door. “That Jonah person. Mr. Chewing Gum. I hope he’s not the one running the meeting.”

  Sure enough, Jonah was slouching by the door, staring vacantly at no point in particular.

  Then a middle-aged man entered the gym, clipboard in hand. Mason could see his mother’s shoulders relaxing with relief.

  “Welcome to YMCA youth basketball!” the man announced in a booming voice.

  Mason mostly tuned out as the man talked about the values that team sports were going to instill in the kids this season. Perseverance. Always giving 110 percent. Striving for your personal best. Respect. Fairness. Team play. Sportsmanship.

  Mason barely listened as the man talked about rules. The main rule, he gathered, was to wear shoes with the right kind of soles. He could handle that. His mother, he saw, was busy taking notes.

  “Any questions?” the man asked.

  She put up her hand. He could have guessed she’d be the first one with a hand in the air.

  “Who is going to be the coach for the team?”

  The man smiled. Something about the smile made Mason nervous.

  “I’m glad you asked. YMCA teams are coached by volunteer coaches. Usually it’s a parent on the team. Every once in a while we’ll get a college kid who’s willing to help us out in the coaching department. But we start by asking the parents. So that’s the last thing we need to do this evening: identify a coach for this newest team.”

  No one spoke.

  “It’s a great way to be involved with your kid and his friends,” the man said. “Coaching gives you a chance to relate to your son and be a part of his world in a whole new way.”

  Still no hands.

  “Now, we hate to cancel a team. We hate to turn away any kid who wants a chance to play. So, Jonah here, who helps us at the registration desk, is willing to fill the coaching slot if we can’t find anyone else.”

  Jonah gave a small shrug of agreement.

  From next to him, Mason heard his mother’s sharp intake of breath. She whispered something to his dad. Mason knew she wasn’t going to think this “Jonah person” was an acceptable, positive coach to make a lifelong athlete out of her son.

  Then she raised her hand.

  “Ma’am?”

  “My husband will do it.”

  Mason whirled around to stare at his dad, who looked clearly bewildered at how he could have come to the meeting as an ordinary dad and left as the team’s brand-new coach.

  Brody clapped, and Brody’s dad gave Mason’s dad an appreciative whack on the back.

  Mason didn’t say anything until they were walking to the car in the chill autumn darkness.

  “But, Dad, you don’t know anything about coaching basketball.”

  “I know, son,” his dad said. “Believe me, I know.”

  * * *

  By Saturday morning, Mason’s dad was looking more cheerful.

  “How hard can it be?” he asked at breakfast, talking more to himself than to anybody else. Or maybe talking more to Dog, who was always a good listener. “This isn’t the NBA. It isn’t the NCAA. It isn’t even high school. It’s fourth-grade basketball.”

  “Did you ever play basketball?” Mason asked him.

  “Not on a team. But we played in P.E. I’m sure we must have played in P.E. We did a little bit of everything in P.E., as I remember.”

  “What team sport did you play?”

  His dad hesitated. “Well, sports weren’t such a big thing back then as they are now.”

  “You didn’t do a team sport. Mom!” Mason alerted his mother, who was flipping through a knitting magazine, looking for ideas to feature in the online knitting newsletter that she edited. “Dad didn’t do a team sport, and he turned out okay.”

  His mother glanced up from her magazine. “Dan, I thought you played Little League Baseball. Didn’t you tell me you played Little League?”

  “I told you that my parents wanted me to play Little League. I stuck it out for a couple of practices, then quit after the first game. The pitcher beaned me in the head with a ball—in all fairness to him, I think he was trying to get it over the plate but had a little problem with aim. So I developed sort of a—well, I wouldn’t call it a phobia, exactly. Let’s just say a fear. A fear of being hit in the head by another ball. So that ended my illustrious baseball career.”

  Mason’s mother gave her husband a worried look.

  “Basketball is different,” his father said quickly. “People don’t throw a basketball as hard, and you’ll have your hands free to catch it before it hits you. Besides”—he added with a grin—“you’re going to have a much better coach than I did.”

  Mason’s mother started to say something. Then she turned her gaze back to her magazine. Mason could see the picture she was studying—some sort of shapeless poncho with loud, zigzaggy green and pink stripes that made the kid wearing it look like—no, there was nothing that could be compared to how that kid looked wearing it.

  A sudden new suspicion burst upon him.

  “Mom, did you ever do a team sport?”

  The split second of silence before she answered was all Mason needed to know that he had guessed correctly.

  As if sensing something new in the conversation, Dog whacked his tail against Mason’s leg; Mason reached down and rubbed Dog’s favorite spot behind his ears.
/>   “But, Mason.” His mother recovered quickly. “We’re so proud of you for wanting to try a team sport. When you don’t like trying anything new. And for wanting to try basketball, of all things. When basketball is such a challenging sport, and when—”

  “Look,” Mason’s dad interrupted. “I ordered a book last night online, all about how to coach basketball, specifically geared for parents who have never coached before. Tracy, this is going to make all the difference.”

  Mason’s mother still looked worried.

  “I put a rush on it, so it should be here Monday afternoon, in time for our first practice Tuesday evening. This book is going to tell me everything I need to know about coaching, and we’re going to have a great basketball season!”

  Or not.

  But Mason gave his dad a sickly grin.

  * * *

  After breakfast, Brody came over so that he and Mason could throw balls for Dog in the new-fallen snow. It had snowed a couple of inches the night before—the first snow of the season usually came by Halloween in Colorado—and the yard was a sparkling expanse of white in the morning sun.

  Mason and Brody tried to play fetch with Dog whatever the weather. If Dog didn’t get enough of an opportunity to carry balls and sticks in his mouth, he tended to use his mouth to start chewing things he wasn’t supposed to chew. Like Mason’s mother’s knitted pillows. Or—once—the elementary school’s stuffed-dragon mascot, which had come home to be repaired and had been demolished by Dog instead.

  Dog excelled at catching tennis balls even in the snow. Sometimes he leaped into the air on his three legs and caught the ball in his mouth. Someone should invent a team sport for dogs. Mason and Brody could coach it together, and Dog would be the star of the team.

  Pleased at this thought, Mason tossed his next ball higher into the air, sending it soaring over Dog’s head onto the snowy lawn of the house next door. The Taylors’ house. The ball landed right next to the NO DOGS sign.

  In a flash, Dog sprinted after it and brought it back to Mason, tail wagging with delight at another mission accomplished. A trail of footprints followed behind him across the Taylors’ previously unmarred blanket of snow.