Page 120 of Uncoachable

I sit in the silence of the medical room, the smell of antiseptic heavy in the air, and realize that for the first time in my career, I’m not the one fighting the hardest battle.

Somewhere down the hallway, the crowd erupts—not in triumph, but in that low, gutted groan that only comes when twenty thousand people watch hope slip through their fingers.

The series isn’t over, but tonight we fell without me, and the weight of that settles over my chest like another injury I can’t tape up.

32

Iveline

The rink is quiet now.

There are no skates carving jagged lines into the surface, no sticks knocking against the boards like rhythmic gunfire. There is just the deep, steady breath of the building itself, a vast cavern of chilled air waiting for the storm of the Eastern Conference Finals to resume.

Sometimes, when the rink is this quiet, I remember my mother the way she really was—sunlight in motion, always warm, always laughing.

She had this way of softening my father without even trying. I used to watch her loop a scarf around his neck before he left for work, teasing him about his terrible knot, and he’d let her fuss over him with that small, private smile he never showed anyone else.

They were a matched set, the kind of quiet, steady love that made the whole house feel warmer.

I don’t see her vividly in my memory; I see her in fragments—the sound of her laugh or a silk scarf left on the back of a velvet chair.

I remember how my mother used to sit on the edge of my bed and tell me stories—not fairy tales, but little pieces of her life with my father. She’d talk about how he was shy when they met, how he brought her flowers every Friday, how he’d look at her like she was the only fixed point in a chaotic world.

I remember thinking they were unbreakable.

After she died, the house didn’t just get quieter—it got colder.

My father tried so hard to keep everything together, but grief rearranges a person.

I think I learned then that loving someone can be the most beautiful and the most terrifying thing you ever do. I learned then what love costs.

I watched it hollow my father out until there was nothing left but the architecture of a man. I watched his grief calcify into discipline, a rigid control that he applied to every corner of our lives like a tourniquet.

So I adapted.

Distance became my primary instinct.

Precision became my armor.

I told myself that if I never let myself want too much or need too deeply, then nothing could ever truly be taken from me.

But now, the armor is a ruin of jagged shards.

The world is trapped in an endless loop of game four. It is slowed down, zoomed in, and dissected from every possible angle by every sports network in the country. The media didn’t hesitate to sharpen their knives.

“Ice Queen Melts Down.”

“Assistant Coach Abandons Bench Mid-Game.”

The headlines bleed into tweets, and the tweets turn into reels where the footage of me screaming at the referees is analyzed frame by frame. They pause on my face, looking for a secret, for a scandal, for anything they can use to rewrite my intentions.

They don’t see a coach worried about a player.

They see a woman losing control and being emotional.

For years, my father’s voice was my north star.

Stoicism as survival; control as currency.