“Your outside edge here - on the crossover - you’re dropping your hip. It’s bleeding your momentum.” I gesture to the position. “If I could just-”
I put my hand on his hip to show him.
He goes completely rigid.
So, if I’m honest, do I - because I didn’t think about it before I did it. It’s how you correct a skater, it’s muscle memory from years of coaching juniors. But he is not a junior and my hand is on his hip and for one suspended, excruciating second, neither of us moves.
I remove my hand.
“There,” I say, as though nothing happened. “If you keep the weight centered through the turn, you’ll find it much easier. Less work for the same result.”
“Right,” he says. His voice is completely even.
“Try it again.”
He does.
And it’s better. Marginally, visibly better. That should be the end of it - a small correction made, a small improvement demonstrated, we move on.
Except.
“See how the hip sits differently now?” I say to the group, gesturing to him. I know - I know as I’m doing it that I’m keeping him there longer than I need to. “That’s what we’re looking for. The adjustments feel small, but over the course of a game they compound. And if the captain is carrying that inefficiency through every shift, every game - so is the rest of the team. They’re watching you,” I say, directly to him now. “Which means your technique sets the standard. Right now, that standard isn’t high enough.”
The fury in his look is so carefully contained it’s almost impressive. His eyes are steady. Everything about him is perfectly controlled except for the fact that I can see, very clearly, that he would like to say something he has decided not to say.
Good, says a small and not very professional part of me.
“That’s enough for today.” I pull my eyes away from him. “Good work. I’ll have a schedule for the next sessions for Coach Calloway by end of day.”
They disperse in the way people disperse when a room has had tension in it and the tension has been released - relieved, a little loud, the chirping starting up again before they’ve even reached the boards.
I skate back toward the gate. But as I go, the calm I was faking starts to slip.
I hadn’t planned that.
The correction was real - everything I said was true, technically - but the length of it, the way I held the moment, the almost deliberate publicness of it.
I think about his face. The fury in it.
I’ve made an enemy of the captain in my first session, which is so far from what I needed to do that it almost makes me want to laugh.
But I’ve met men like that before. Men who decide before you’ve opened your mouth. I know what it costs to underestimate that. To smile and soften and make yourself smaller to accommodate it, to tell yourself it isn’t worth the fight.
I did that once.
I won’t do it again.
I push open the door to the corridor and the cold rink air follows me out.
That doesn’t mean I handled this well, says a quieter, more honest part of me.
I pull my jacket tighter and keep walking.
3
Chapter 3
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