“I don’t have projects. I have players.”
“Sure,” Owen said. “And I don’t have commitment issues, I’m just building community.”
“You went on three dates with a woman and changed grocery stores to avoid her.”
“She shopped aggressively.”
The conversation went nowhere for ten minutes, which was exactly why I stayed on. They complained about Owen’s shifts at the firehouse, Nate’s neighbor learning bass guitar, Mom’s new obsession with pickleball, Dad pretending his knee didn’t hurt when everyone knew it did. They took shots at my beard, my diet, my inability to understand TikTok, then signed off with the kind of casual love none of us ever named directly.
After the call, the silence came back, but warmer around the edges.
Tiny abandoned me for the couch again.
I let him.
Near midnight, I opened the player files I’d been avoiding because reading other people’s judgments before forming my own always irritated me. Still, history mattered. Patterns mattered.
Roman Vega’s file was clean and brutally honest. Veteran goaltender. Technically sound. Dry room presence. Trusted by core players. Divorced last year, performance dip temporary, recovered. Protects younger teammates. Can be resistant to rest days. I added my own note: Sees everything. Use him, but don’t lean too hard.
Milo Brooks was next. Twenty-four, winger, high skill, confidence tied too tightly to scoring. Needed direct feedback without theatrics. Responded poorly to being benched, responded well to specific targets.
Eli Serrano: defenseman, steady, underappreciated, likely playing through something he wasn’t reporting.
Grant Lowell: fast, coachable, too eager to please, needed permission to make mistakes.
Dmitri Sokolov: brilliant when engaged, moody when underused, not lazy despite reputation.
I read, compared, marked up the margins. The work settled me. People liked to pretend coaching was speeches and systems. Mostly it was observation. Find the lever, understand the pressure, know when not to touch it.
I left Jace Holloway for last.
The file was thick.
Elite offensive instincts. Franchise center. High marketability. Charismatic. Emotional. Prone to lateness. Inconsistent adherence to team processes. Requires repeated reminders. Can challenge authority. Disruptive when disengaged. Competitive to a fault. Management concern mitigated by production.
There were staff notes going back years. Some fair. Some lazy. Difficult appeared more than once. So did immature. One assistant had written, brilliant when he decides to care.
I didn’t like that.
Not because Holloway had made a sterling first impression. He hadn’t. He’d been late, distracted, reactive, and clearly capable of turning any instruction into a fence to kick.
But he had also seen the weak-side seam instantly. He’d apologized to Tessa without being cornered into it. Not performatively either. A quick, guilty sorry from a man who knew he’d created extra work for her.
He’d panicked when he thought he’d lost his phone while holding it, which could have been carelessness or overload. Maybe both.
In the parking lot, when I gave him a clear expectation, the defiance had stayed on his face, but his attention had changed. Not obedient. Focused. As if the shape of the thing mattered.
Eight-thirty. Players’ lounge. Notebook. Phone away before you walk in.
Clear.
The report called him a management headache. Maybe he was.
Or maybe everyone kept handing him fog and getting angry when he couldn’t carry it.
Tiny groaned in his sleep, paws twitching.
I stared at Holloway’s file longer than I should have. Not because I cared more. I told myself that. Because he was complicated. Because a player that talented could tilt a season if handled rightor poison a room if handled wrong. Because coaching meant solving the hard ones, not coasting on the easy ones.
