Page 31 of Her Coach

I wasn’t thinking about what that meant yet.

“Moose,” I said as I moved toward the crease. “Your tracking is off. You’re reading the shooter too early and it’s costing you the angle. Watch the puck until the last possible second.”

Moose pulled his mask up. “I tend to anticipate.”

“I know. Stop it.”

He dropped the mask back down.

“Again,” I said. “Full speed this time.”

I pulsed the whistle and they went.

Then Rhett skated past me on a line change, smooth as anything, and said without looking at me, “Brynn still in your office?”

I didn’t look at him either. “Run the drill.”

He kept skating. Kept grinning. I could tell without seeing it.

The thing was, I’d known exactly what I was doing earlier. It wasn’t a reflex. I knew I was flirting with her but I couldn’t stop myself. Which made it a choice, and choices had consequences, and the consequence of this particular choice was that I now had to figure out what to do with the fact that I’d made it.

She was the owner’s daughter. She was fourteen years younger than me. I had been in this city less than a week and I was already running into problems that looked uncomfortably similar to the ones I’d just spent six weeks trying to outrun. Except it didn’t feel similar. That was the part I couldn’t rationalize away. The thing with Lydia had been easy and uncomplicated right up until it wasn’t. This thing felt complicated from the first night she stood behind that bar and looked at me like she was running numbers in her head.

Easy things didn’t feel like this.

I blew the whistle. Reset the drill.

“Jett,” I said as he came around on the rotation, “you’ve got good hands. Your problem is you know it. When a player knows he’s good at something, he stops paying attention to the rest of his game. Don’t let your hands make you lazy.”

He considered that while coasting. “What should I focus on?”

“Your feet. You skate like someone who assumes he’ll get the puck. Skate like someone who has to earn it.”

He didn’t say anything, but something shifted in his stance on the next pass. Good. He was coachable underneath all that chirp.

I ran them through two more cycles before calling a water break. While they congregated at the boards, I walked the length of the ice and made notes on my clipboard. Line combinations. Timing issues. The gap between Rhett and Jett on the offensive rush that we’d have to fix before we played a team that knew how to exploit it. The way our third defenseman, a kid named Frank who hadn’t said more than six words to me yet, had instincts that nobody had bothered to develop. That one was going to be interesting.

I had a lot of work to do.

For the first time since the gala, I was glad about that.

“All right,” I said as I moved back to center ice. “Last set. We’re going to run a power play sequence. Defense gives me a screen, offense finds the lane. Moose, I want you reading the lane, not the shooter. You give me the same anticipation tells you’ve been giving me all morning and you’re doing bag skates at the end of practice.”

Moose straightened up. “Yes, Coach.”

I ran them through the power play sequence three times. The first was a disaster. The second was mediocre. The third time, Rhett found a seam I hadn’t even drawn up in the play and put it on Jett’s tape so cleanly that even I had to blink. Jett buried it top shelf, turned around, and spread his arms wide at me like he was expecting a standing ovation.

“Again,” I said.

He dropped his arms. The boys laughed.

We ran it twice more. By the end I had what I needed. A baseline. Something to build from.

I pulsed the whistle three times. “Off the ice. Cooldown stretch in the gym, then showers. I want everyone in the film room at three.”

“Film room?” Jett called. “We have a film room?”

“You do now. I set it up this morning.” I moved toward the gate. “Three o’clock. Don’t be late.”