Page 22 of On His Team

“Skates in the rack go back to their stalls tomorrow morning. Don’t guess. If the tape on the blade guard doesn’t have a number, ask Cole.” He flips the page. “And start the road list for the fifteenth. Two games, one night.”

I look up. “Me?”

“You.”

“Not Cole?” I ask, confused.

“Cole’s doing the steel inventory that week, and you’re going to be doing this in April whether you like it or not, so you’re going to learn it now while it’s a two-game trip and I can fix whatever you screw up.”

I widen my eyes. “That’s inspirational.”

“Start with last year’s list. It’s in the drive. Don’t just copy it. Half of it’s wrong.”

He walks off.

Cole runs another blade and doesn’t turn around.

“He gave me that in October, my sophomore year,” he says. “It’s a good sign.”

“It’s a spreadsheet.”

“Yeah, but he’s not going to give it to Evan.”

Evan, from the floor, says, “I can hear you.”

Still, I look at the note on my phone again after Donovan walks away.

Statistics is at nine in the morning in a lecture hall built for two hundred students and filled with about ninety. I get there eight minutes early because it’s the first day and I have never in my life been late to a first day.

I’m not bad at school, but I’ve got a 3.4. I’ve never dropped a class, and I liked Sport Finance so much last semester that I read ahead. I’m just scared of this one.

The professor comes in at nine on the dot, plugs in his laptop, and starts talking before the slide is even up.

For the first eleven minutes, I’m completely fine. At minute twelve, he writes something on the board with about nine parts to it and says, “And obviously we’re going to be working in terms of the sampling distribution, not the population, which is the distinction that half of you will spend the semester failing to internalize.”

Half the room writes that down.

I understand every single individual word coming out of this man’s mouth. It’s the order he’s putting them in that’s pissing me off.

I write down sampling distribution ≠ population and put a box around it and then a second box around the first box.

At the end, he tells us the first homework is due Thursday, and there’s a quiz next Friday, and everybody makes a noise. He mentions it’s worth two percent, and everybody stops.

I get outside and stand on the steps in the cold for a second with my hands in my sleeves.

Lucy took this class. Benson took it too, and he needed help, which should probably make me feel better. It doesn’t. I stand on the steps with my hands tucked into my sleeves and watch my breath cloud in front of me. I live with the best tutor available to me. I would also rather eat the textbook than ask her on day one. Benson would enjoy that far too much.

Event and Facility Management is at ten-thirty in a room that seats forty, and it’s full. I get a seat in the second row because I know from Sport Finance that you can’t hear anything past row four in these rooms.

Professor Ives doesn’t do a syllabus day. She puts one slide up and leaves it there.

SPM 240 — YOU ARE RUNNING A REAL EVENT.

“Here’s how this class works,” she says. “You will not be planning a hypothetical gala. You will not be building a fictional budget for a fictional venue with fictional money. You are going to conceive an event, pitch it to me, build a real budget, take it through the actual university approval process, staff it, execute it on a real date in a real Camden facility, and then evaluate it afterward with real numbers.”

Somebody in the back says, “Wait.”

“You’ll work in groups of three or four. You’ll pitch in week four. If I approve the pitch, you build. If I don’t approve it, you pitch again in week five with less time.”