The Unknown

Coach Ryder

Stacey's pov

Ahhh basketball, by far our favorite sport. My cousin and I both made the freshmen girls' team and we're having a blast. Thanks to our coach Mr. Ryder, we're also getting in shape very quickly. Coach Ryder loves using conditioning exercises as negative reinforcement.

Right now we're fifteen minutes into wall sits (with your back against the wall and knees bent at a ninety degree angle you basically pretend you're sitting on an invisible chair). Coach Ryder has us doing wall sits until every girl on the team can make in consecutive order, a right and left handed lay-up. As soon as someone misses, we start all over again. After you do your lay-up you return to the end of the wall sit line. After forty minutes without successfully completing this drill, Coach Ryder finally takes mercy on us and we move on to the next drill.

Well, I wouldn't call it mercy because now he has us running laps based on how many free-throws we miss. We each take turns shooting ten free-throws and then we run two full laps around the court for each one we miss. Next, we're back to wall sits during our water break. We all line up against the wall and do wall sits until it's our turn at the water fountain and then it's back to the end of the line until everyone's had their turn. You quickly begin to loathe your teammates for taking more than a quick sip.

Anyway, back to Coach Ryder. I can describe his physical appearance but there's no way in Hell I can even touch the surface of his personality. He's 6'2", thin, has short dark brown hair, a wispy mustache and always wears dorky, round lens glasses. He kind of has a nerdy professor thing going on with his wardrobe. He actually wears tweed jackets with elbow patches but he's only like twenty-seven years old. The man is definitely a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, encased in a fortune cookie, trapped inside an enigma when it comes to his personality and demeanor. I don't know what it is about him that makes you want his approval so badly that you're willing to work your ass off for the man but by the same accord, you want nothing more than to piss him off.

He never yells, I mean never. Even when he's angry, he never raises his voice. Don't get me wrong, he's scary as fuck when he's mad and you'll know without a shadow of a doubt when he is but it's so weird that he never loses his temper. He always has that eerie calm facade akin to a serial killer. He's the guy whose next door neighbor is being interviewed on the six o'clock news when he finally gets caught with like fifty body parts in his basement freezer and the neighbor is like, "We would never have thought he could do such a thing. He kept to himself, he was so quiet and polite. He always gave me a curt nod when we'd see each other getting the morning paper."

Possibly the strangest thing about Coach Ryder is that he brings his two-year-old son Nathan to practice like ninety percent of the time but he never talks to the kid. We didn't even know it was his kid for like the first two weeks because he never even acknowledged him, let alone interacted with him. Usually one of the girls on the team will babysit him during practice because we feel sorry for him. Sometimes Coach Ryder's wife will sit in the bleachers while we practice but she never talks to the kid either or Coach Ryder, for that matter. How bizarre.

My cousin and I love to try to get a rise out of Coach Ryder but he has yet to yell at us. He does enjoy punishing us by making us run ladders (suicides) though. The easiest way to piss him off is by being late to practice and God knows, with the amount of detentions my cousin and I accumulate, it's a pretty common occurrence.

He'll just look at you and say, "You're late. Start running." In fact, he said those very words to my cousin just the other day when she showed up late to practice after serving a detention. When he does say it, you sure as Hell better keep your mouth shut and start running. Don't ask questions, just run. He'll let you know when you can stop. He even makes us do push-ups if he's really annoyed. I guess you could say basketball is a good mental and physical workout for us.