“Fuck dealing with teenagers.”
“They’re notteenagers. Well, they are, but they’re still kids. Just show up for a few hours, take them through some low-level stuff and leave. It’s not a big deal.”
“Bloke…”
“The money’s not there,” Byron said coldly. “No one’s invested. You’ve got a chance to do something good here. So do something good.”
Derek had tried to talk his way out of it. He’d said Beaconsfield was in butt-fuck nowhere, and he was dogshit with teenagers, and Maggie was only his second cousin, but Byron wouldn’t hear it. A week later, he was driving east. He’d told Mara he was going to see his cousins, but not why. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe he was just embarrassed to have been strong-armed into doing the first football-related thing he’d gone near in years.
The oval where the clinic was held was as patchy and potholed as the one Derek had grown up playing on. The girls were familiar too, loud and loose with multi-coloured hair and tatty clothes. Like his sisters, Derek guessed they’d already seen too much bullshit and only expected to see more. Maggie barely acknowledged him. Just gave him a half-assed wave and kept talking to her mates.
“We’re still waiting on a couple of girls,” their coach, a grandad with more energy than experience, told him. “How about a tour?”
The tour turned out to be more of a debrief on the shittiness of most of the players’ lives and the cooked state of the women’s league.
“They’re not bad players,” Coach Gavin had said as soon as they were alone. “They’ve just had a rough go of it. There isn’t a budget for boots or pads, and the boys don’t like sharing the oval. We only got a regular night for training a few weeks ago.”
“Right,” Derek said, desperately wishing he could throttle Byron.
“But they all want to be here. They show up whenever we can get access to the field, day or night, rain or shine. They love the game, and they’re bloody beside themselves to meet you.”
Derek hadn’t believed that for a second. He was right not to. The girls who made up the Beaconsfield under-sixteens were cheeky little bastards. Worse than any of the boys he’d done clinics with back when he was still playing. They talked whenever he did, rolled their eyes at corrections and constantly asked for breaks.
“Your uncle’s boring,” a girl with pigtails told Maggie during one such unscheduled break. “I thought he was meant to be, like…cool.”
“He’s not my uncle,” Maggie had protested. “We’re hardly related.”
At that point, Derek had lost it. “Yeah, Maggie, that’s why I can run and bounce at the same time. And, Pigtails, kick straightonce,and you can shit-talk me. Until then, quit wasting time and get back to the fucking drills.”
He’d expected them to be horrified, but Maggie and her friend had pissed themselves laughing.
“Scary,” Pigtails said in a stage whisper.
“So scary,” Maggie whispered back.
Derek found himself fighting back a grin. “Get back to work. People paid for this clinic, and I bet it wasn’t either of your dads.”
“My dad’s in jail,” Pigtails said.
“So’s mine.” Derek shot back. “I can still kick right.”
Pigtails, who’d turned out to be called Sandie, had given him the finger, but to his surprise, she and Maggie went back to training. They stopped taking random breaks and told off the other girls for doing it. By the time they broke for lunch—tinned spaghetti and sandwiches—all of the Beaconsfield under-sixteens had stopped giving him lip and started following orders. He was shocked by their improvement, not just their attitudes but their playing. Coach Gavin wasn’t wrong; they were full of potential. Maggie was one of the best on ground; she had a great kick and an even better tackle, putting her body on the line in a way he hadn’t seen outside barfights. He’d told her so, and she’d smiled so wide you’d have thought he’d given her a new phone.
“What did I tell you?” Coach Gavin said happily as they walked to the carpark when things wrapped up. “They’re great girls; they just need a chance.”
“Call this number,” Derek had said, giving him Chase Hanson’s card. “I wanna donate boots and balls and tackling bags.”
“Fantastic!” Coach Gavin hesitated. “Is there any chance you’d, uh, come back? Put in a little more time with the girls?”
Derek had known the question was coming, but it stung more than he expected to say he didn’t have the time.
“I understand,” Coach Gavin said. “But you’re good with them.”
“Anyone with experience’ll be able to get them to the next level.”
The old-timer gave him a wry look. “They like you. They’re already starting to trust you. And they’re not used to anyone worth a damn caring about them.”
Derek had been wrestling with those words ever since. Caring had never been his strong suit. He cared about Mara and his boys. He cared about his friends and, despite their many fuck-ups, his family. But footy had always been about what he could do. Where he could go. He wasn’t the coaching type. He wasn’t even the watching-the-game type anymore. But at random points in his day, he found himself remembering Maggie’s tackling or Sandie giving him the finger and grinning.
