The Gift of a Coach: A Novel of Baseball and Friendship

Chapter Four: Keep Your Eyes on the Ball

"So, what do we do now?"

That same question was rolling around in Jake's head and he had no idea how he was gonna answer it. The kids in front of him were definitely not the kids he had seen at tryouts. It was like... they had fallen apart before they even started. Jake was speechless and he was pretty sure Nick felt the same way.

The practice had started off normal. Jake just briefed over everything he had done at the tryout, trying to make it quick because he had said it before. And since he wanted to see how they all worked together, Jake set them up in positions that he had thought they knew. Fifteen minutes later, Jake hadn't moved from his spot near home plate, Nick beside him, and no one had caught a ball yet.

And all Jake was doing was hitting ground balls.

After another ball passed through Pete Rolfo's legs at first base, Jake had had enough.

"Guys! Come here"

Jake heard Nick mumble something that sounded like, "I feel the same way"

"Guys, I... not to come off as outright cause that's not me but what exactly did Lane teach you?"

The kids were silent as Jake looked at them all. He felt guilty the way he asked them the minute the words left his mouth. The last thing he wanted to do was start what might be one of the best things of his life with an argument.

"Uh, all he really did was make us run laps, Coach Jake. We did some fielding but we weren't very good," Parker finally spoke up, fiddling with the strings on his brown Wilson glove, absentmindedly

Jake's heart kind of broke at that moment, and it took all he had to not walk away and hand this job to someone else. Instead, he just took a deep breath and nodded.

"Alright. So, let's start over"

Jake put his bat against the fence and grabbed two orange cones.

"When I was younger, this was the first drill my dad ever taught me to do. Now I know this is high school, but we got to go back to basics, okay? And that's not a bad thing"

"Coach Jake?" Dainn asked, raising his hand.

"Yep?"

"You can just say it. We suck," Dainn laughed and the entire team joined in, nodding agreement. Jake smiled and then started to chuckle along.

There went that heart skipping a beat moment again.

"Alright, alright. We don't suck. Come here, fellas"

The team crowded around Jake as Nick stood silent, watching his best friend lay out the cones. There were three rows, two on each side. Jake positioned two people as if they were playing catch with each other and then walked down the line back to the front.

"Alright, listen up! Back to basics. Baseball 101. Glove remains on the ground the entire time. Not on our hips, not on our knees. On the ground. We have our legs spread out, not too wide, not too thin"

As Jake spoke, he demonstrated it, having Nick toss him his old brown glove. He thought melancholy, of his late father and how he was looking down and wondering how he raised such a good son. Jake shook himself off the conjuring memories and focused on his task ahead.

"Alright. So what I want us to do is roll ground balls back and forth to your partner. Nick, toss me like, uh, six or seven, balls?"

Nick nodded and grabbed Jake's bucket, setting it on the line and tossing him the number of balls he asked for. Jake saw the team looking incredulously at him as he caught some with his hand and four in his glove right after the other.