Sea Glass Winter by Joann Ross Page A

one of the players from summer camp and had seen all he needed to see. “We’ve got a lot of work to do before our first game,” he said. “No point in wasting time making you all wait around to see who made the cut.”
    They’d strutted into the gym like the rock stars they were in their own male teenage minds. Having been there himself, Dillon could empathize. But the way he saw it, no one had hired him to be Mr. Rogers.
    “Well,” Jim said as the kids all walked out, far more silently than they’d entered. “That was interesting.”
    “You think I was too hard on them?” The way the air had gone out of their sails left Dillon feeling a lot like Voldemort from the Harry Potter DVD he had watched while stationed out in the middle of nowhere near the Pakistan border. Though he would’ve preferred an action flick with a lot of explosions, beggars couldn’t be choosers, downrange especially.
    Damn. Coaching a bunch of kids was turning out to be a lot tougher than leading troops who’d already been through basic training, where someone else got to yell at them.
    “Someone needed to be,” the JV coach assured him. “Pete Houston was a good guy. Everyone in town liked him. Even Ken Curtis, who, if you cut him, probably bleeds Dolphin blue. But it was obvious to everyone that he’d burned out on coaching a long time ago and was mostly just going through the motions until he got enough years in for retirement.”
    “No one thought about replacing him?”
    “Like I said, everyone liked him,” Don said with shrug. “He’d played here himself as a kid. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think anyone but Curtis ever had any real expectations for the team.”
    “Including the players themselves.” Dillon had already figured that out for himself.
    “Yeah. It wasn’t that they didn’t try,” Jim said. “But they weren’t getting what they needed to succeed. And I seriously doubt there was a guy on the court who ever worried about pissing Pete off.”
    “I’m not a hard-ass,” Dillon said. “But I was hired to do a job. And I’m damn well going to do it to the best of my ability.”
    “I doubt there was a person who was in the gym earlier who doubts that,” Don said.
    “What are you doing about Templeton?” Jim asked.
    “I met his mom before school and got a good vibe about his home situation.” Dillon saw no reason to mention that he hadn’t been thinking about Claire Templeton’s maternal vibes the entire time. “So I’m going to take a chance and try him on varsity.”
    “As much as I’d love to have him on JV, I can’t argue with that decision. The kid’s going to have college coaches drooling all over him for the next three years.”
    “True. And we need to be prepared for that.” He turned toward Don. “We also need to assure the other guys that each and every one of them is vital to the season’s success. Because jealousy could end up tearing the team apart before we have our first game.”
    Which was something Dillon was determined to avoid.
    Somehow.

13
    They were freaking freezing him out. A couple of kids, including Johnny, had complimented him on his shooting, and the one who’d thrown the French fry at lunch, then made a joke the coach hadn’t appreciated, had even asked him about how he managed to switch hands like that on the run, but then Dickhead Dirk had shot them all the evil eye, which shut them up.
    Shields had immediately gone up. Leaving Matt on the outside.
    There’d been a few minutes, when he’d been flying around the court, when he’d felt back in the groove. As if, just maybe, this move might work out.
    Yeah. Right.
    He was—no big surprise—the last guy to get called into the cluttered broom closet Coach Slater called an office. He’d done the math, and from the results, he knew there was one spot left on the varsity team. Which meant, Matt thought with a burst of the first excitement he’d felt in weeks, he was in. Not that there’d ever been a