Full Court Press by Eric Walters Read Free Book Online Page A

for a long time, if ever.
    Next I pulled off my tear-aways and sat down to change shoes. Mr. Roberts came back to join us.
    â€œWe’re going to be starting in a couple of minutes. I want everybody to go out and warm up. Come on, Nick, get those shoes on!”
    I did up the laces as quickly as I could, but was still the last on the floor. Kids took shots and fooled around on their own until Mr. Roberts joined us on the floor and set us up to do a lay-up drill. Thank goodness he hadn’t asked us to do a weave. That would have been embarrassing.
    Between my turns I looked down at the other team. They didn’t look much bigger than us. Actually, except for me and Kia, I thought we were probably a little bit bigger.
    They’d switched to another drill. They were coming toward the hoop, stopping, and putting up a jumper. They were making some and missing some. Nothing too special.
    What was special though was the way they were dressed. They were all wearing basketball sweaters — real basketball sweaters. Gold and black with a gigantic eagle emblem on the front. And they were wearing matching shorts and socks. The only difference between players wastheir shoes. With us, the only thing the same was our smelly sweaters.
    â€œCome on, Nick, it’s your turn,” Dean said, handing me a ball.
    I dribbled, put a pass over to the other lane, ran to the net to receive the return pass, grabbed the ball and laid it up on the boards for a basket. At least that still worked. Maybe we’d do okay.
    * * *
    â€œNice game,” he said as he slapped my hand on the way by.
    â€œNice game,” said the second player and then the third and fourth as we walked through the line.
    It didn’t matter what words came out of their mouths, I could tell by the smirks on their face, and the numbers on the scoreboard, what they really were thinking: you guys stink, you guys suck, you don’t belong in the same gym with us. And the worst part was they were right.
    The scorekeeper flipped the board back to zero. Thank goodness I didn’t have to look at the score any longer. Not that I’d ever forgetit. Seventy-six to twenty-nine.
    â€œI want everybody to sit down and we’ll talk for a little while before we drive home,” Mr. Roberts said.
    He was trying to sound cheerful, but I could tell by the catch in his voice that he was as bothered by the score as the rest of us. He was trying his best to hide his feelings.
    â€œObviously we didn’t win today, but we did learn some important things.”
    I had to agree. We’d learned lots of things — none of which I wanted to know.
    â€œOur challenge is to look at our game, as a team and individually, and decide what we did right and what we need to improve on.”
    It wouldn’t take long to think about what we’d done right. We hadn’t scored on our own net, nobody had died, and we’d found the school. That was about it.
    There wasn’t much for me to do about the way I’d played either. I’d been out for about thirty seconds in the first half and no more than two minutes in the second. I’d taken no shots, made no points, had no fouls, no assists, no rebounds, and had made one steal. That one steal was the only thing separating me from a perfect ‘O-fer’ game.
    â€œYou have to realized that this team we were playing has been together for a long time. They were playing as a group last year,” Mr. Roberts said. “Vista always has a ‘B’ team of grade fours. They practiced with the grade five championship team from last year. So keep in mind that we lost to a very good team.”
    â€œWhy did we have to play against them for our first game?” Dean questioned, asking the question that I think was on everybody’s mind.
    â€œTo see what we could do well, and to figure out what we needed to work on. This was a good loss,” Mr. Roberts said.
    If this was a good loss, I