stick, with Coach’s face reflected back at her ad nauseum. She doesn’t know where to aim. How best to confront Coach. What is her team willing to risk? Their entire season? What do they hope to gain?
Whatever the approach, the girls must be united. They can’t have a single girl slip. But there are so many angles, so many individual voices to consider, so many grievances that need to be addressed. Does everyone want to come into the classroom? Or should Mel take it on herself to be a messenger?
These were the things Mel had planned to discuss with the girls last night, once she’d read the email Phoebe had asked her to. But one led Mel to read two more for context, led to another ten for a deeper understanding, led to twenty, forty, sixty.
As with all things Coach, once Mel got sucked in, it was nearly impossible for her to climb back out.
The alarm buzzes again. Fifty minutes left. Mel hits snooze once more. Then she picks Coach’s laptop off her floor. She rubs her finger across the track pad, hoping to wake it, but the battery is dead.
No matter. She’s carrying the proof in her heart. Is it any wonder it feels so bruised? What Mel has discovered about Coach is so much worse than she ever could have imagined.
Coach didn’t turn down the job with the Men’s Junior National team, as he had framed it during Mel’s Truman celebration dinner.
It was never offered to him.
At first, this truly surprised Mel, but as she worked her way down his inbox, it became clear that Coach hadn’t been offered most of the jobs he sought, despite sending out a steady stream of résumés since receiving his West Essex email address.
For the ones he did manage to get, Coach was never happy with some aspect of the contract—nine times out of ten it was the salary, which Coach always felt was “offensively low”—and negotiations would inevitably break down.
More often than not, he shined up his applications with the aspirations of his Wildcats. Parlaying interest in his players to curry favors, information, recommendations. It was always done carefully, casually, friendly, subtly. It certainly put Coach’s policy of keeping scout information from his players in a new context. By controlling their access to who was and wasn’t interested, Coach gave himself an infinite number of aces to play.
Mel was excited to spill this tea, let the girls know just how many schools had been in touch with Coach to express interest in recruiting them. Ali, especially. It seemed like every single D1 school had her on their radar.
But when Mel came across an email from Coach Karen, she almost couldn’t bring herself to open it, afraid to see the ways Coach had inserted himself into orchestrating her acceptance to Truman.
It turned out, however, that he had not needed to call in any special favors, or beg them to take a look at her. In fact, Coach Karen herself had made it clear she was very interested in Mel as early as sophomore season. Nor did Coach have to send a last SOS to pull Mel out from the reject pile, as he’d claimed less than an hour after her celebration dinner. These were all lies to make her feel beholden to him.
If anything, Coach was the one reaching out to the scout and Coach Karen, under the guise of checking in about Mel, but he pivoted immediately to tout his own accomplishments.
Coach Karen rarely, if ever, responded.
Maybe that’s why Coach Karen had hinted, as Mel had sobbed in the Truman locker room, that she was aware of just how intense it was to play at West Essex.
Thinking back, Mel can’t believe how quickly she bought into Coach’s narrative. How fast she made herself dismiss that personal note Coach Karen had included in her offer letter. She let the narrative Coach had fed her—that her accomplishments all hinged on having Coach’s wind at her back—completely override her own experiences.
Plenty of these kinds of revelations have already occurred to Mel. And surely more will come to her in the days, weeks, months, years it will take Mel to unpack just how gaslighted she allowed herself to be. Hopefully she’ll be able to forgive herself for this, but right now, she doesn’t imagine she ever will. She imagines second-guessing and third-guessing and fourth-guessing herself for the rest of her life. He’s permanently disfigured her with a reflex of believing the worst about herself.
Her phone