Then, when he said the word ‘today,’ my brain wished me good luck and shut down. My nervous system had slowed the minute he said the words ‘you’ and ‘press conference’ in the same sentence just a minute before. Just thinking about what he wanted me to do sent my heart pounding. Come on,” he chastised me in a low, playful voice that gave the impression he was giving me a choice.

“Sal,” the head coach of the team said my name again. Plus, it was my motivation on the mornings when I sat on the edge of my bed looking and feeling more dead than alive, to get up and go on my daily five-mile run. I had the same picture in my apartment, a constant reminder of twenty years’ worth of hard work paying off. I was right next to him holding the game soccer ball under one arm with my other around Jenny, our team’s goalie. He was in the middle of the group with the league trophy, this three-foot monstrosity, held high above his head. On either side were pictures with his son and a few framed photographs of the Pipers on the field over the years-my favorite was a shot of the team last year when we’d won the Women’s Professional League championship. I chose his office walls.Ī neat line of diplomas hung to his right. I needed to focus on something else to relax. Then again, Jeffrey Dahmer had been attractive, so good looks weren’t exactly the best scale of measurement for an individual’s mental health.Ĭalm down, take a deep breath, and get it together, Sal. Demented and out-of-his-freaking mind, but handsome nonetheless. For being in his late forties, he was still a looker.

I sat back against the chair in his office and took in the silvering hair on his head, his smooth, unlined face and the Houston Pipers polo shirt he had on. “I need you, Sal,” Coach Gardner, the man who was asking the impossible of me, insisted. I understood all the individual words in the sentence, but putting them together in that moment was the equivalent of telling a blind person you wanted them to see something real quick. But my brain couldn’t wrap itself around the sentence that had come out of his mouth. The man sitting across the desk from me repeated himself.

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