That shut me up again.
He played the clip. Paused. Rewound. Played it slower.
“There,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”
I started answering before the clip even settled in my head. “Their F2 is late, D is flat-footed, if I loop lower I can pull him with me and open the seam, but if Lowell bobbles it, then yeah, we’re dead, and Roman complains, and everyone acts like I personally invented turnovers.”
Reid waited.
I shifted. “What?”
“You jumped from read one to consequence four.”
“I got there, didn’t I?”
“You did. I’m asking if you can separate the steps.”
My knee stopped bouncing for half a second.
Nobody asked that.
People told me to slow down, which was like telling a fire alarm to consider jazz. They told me to focus, as if I wasn’t focusing on too much at once. Reid was asking me to show the work.
“I can try,” I said, more carefully than I meant to.
So we did.
It should have been boring. It wasn’t. He paused clips and made me name one thing at a time. Puck. Pressure. Support. Exit. If I got ahead of myself, he brought me back without snapping.
“Start with the puck.”
“I know where the puck is.”
“Say it anyway.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Maybe. Do it.”
I exhaled hard. “Puck is on Lowell’s backhand.”
“Pressure?”
“Coming from inside shoulder.”
“Support?”
“Me, too high.”
He clicked the remote. “So?”
“So I come lower.”
“Good. Next.”
There it was again. That simple, controlled acknowledgment. Not a gold star. Not a performance. Just confirmation that I’d met the expectation.
My chest loosened in a way that made me uncomfortable.
