The Coach's Daughter Playbook

Formation: At three months old, I sit beside my dad, strapped into the carrier, and we watch a football game together. He starts and stops the video, rewinds, takes notes. The flicker of light, the splash of color captures my attention, but the impressions left against infant imagination become a habit. I am watching. I spend my life watching. 

Audible: Some families trace genealogy. I trace the routes, coverages, and schemes that have orchestrated my childhood. A thousand possible futures are rewritten with each game, each broadcaster comment about whether or not the team is due for a change of leadership. Allegiances are deep, but transitory. We live lives half-packed, on the move: Chicago, Danville, Des Moines, where next?

Sideline: My sister and I play along the ridge that edges the mid-week practice field. We roll down the hillside, catching grass blades in our hair and teeth. The horizon flips in endless revolutions. We land on the edge of the field, dizzied, and our ears fill with helmet-crack and whistle-buzz and our dad’s voice calling, “Again!” We race to the top of the hill and throw ourselves down one more time. 

Press Box: During my senior year of high school, I spend the four-month season behind the camera lens, a volunteer videographer. I climb press box trapeze, balance on scaffolds, taste rain, soak sun. Mine is a bird’s eye view. I memorize each stroke of yard line paint, the arc of each ball, the ensemble steps of 110 uniformed bodies.  

Trenches: So many of my friends don’t know what their fathers do at work every day, but my parents have always said, “We do this together.” 

Encroachment: Dinners without Dad. Phone calls before bedtime from a hotel in Indiana or New York, Pennsylvania or Texas. Hugs in a public stairway when he can’t drop me off at college because he has to stay behind, to care for the children of others. 

Personnel: Couch cushions cave when the players leave the annual home-cooked meal, and my parents shop for new furniture. The rule: if a full-grown Rebecca can sit against the back of the seat and still bend her knees over the edge of the couch, it’s not deep enough. I have mastered the art of sliding through crowds of muscled bodies without getting trampled. When I catch up to them in years, never in height, I finally recognize the homesick glimmer in their eyes. Only then do I realize how much sharing my life means to them. 

Handoff: Dad is climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with his team, when I turn sixteen. Before they leave for Tanzania, though, the team sings an off-key “Happy Birthday” chorus, and the cake is large enough to feed one hundred. Dad writes a postcard at sunrise from the summit. I have a card from Oxford for my 10th. On my 23rd, there is a phone call from China. These moments remind me I am part of something bigger than myself. 

Game Clock: Dad has carried a picture in his briefcase for twenty years, the edges curling. He kneels in the endzone after a game, his face buried in his arms, weeping. As the clock expired, he learned that his father has died. But my dad is not alone in the photo. His head coach kneels beside him. He shelters my dad and whispers prayers only they share.

Cadence: I fall asleep many nights to the sound of Dad’s voice on the phone, describing the possibilities of a college education to eighteen-year-old athletes across the country. His words wander from the kitchen to my bedroom. As I drift, I parrot his words, and, when I am older, I find confidence in repeating the familiarity of these stories.

Pocket: Three benches in the stadium are labeled, “Reserved for Coaches’ Families.” This is survival, not territorialism. We fill the spaces with noise. Clappers and horns and pom-pom rustle. Most of all, our voices. I was in sixth grade when, sitting alone at an away game, I listened to a stranger shout insults at my father for three hours. 

Play Call: In college, people refer to me as the real-life version of “that little girl in Remember the Titans.” I play along. I know how difficult it is to define me. 

Line of Scrimmage: The lesson on paradox in my high school creative writing class makes sense to my classmates when our teacher explains that I am the living embodiment. “She’s the studious, creative type during the week,” the teacher says, “but on Saturdays she turns into a rabid football fan.” My classmates laugh. I wonder at the split that runs down the center of my life. But football is a game of misfits. It’s why, when I sit in the bleachers above the practice field with my latest manuscript balanced on my lap, I feel like I finally belong. 

Blind side: Dad speaks of his sense that another change is coming. Even though I am in the basement bedroom, I wake in the middle of the night to hear him screaming. The muscles in his legs have tightened, coiled. I feed him spoonfuls of mustard until the pain subsides. A week later, he stands before his team and then the media and tells them that his time with them has finished. That none of us know what comes next. In the weeks that follow, with every question of “why,” I wish I could scream too, but I keep my silence and let the questions echo.

Hang Time: Sometimes, I wonder who we are—who we will be—without this game today or tomorrow or however many years from now. Who is my father? Who am I? 

Intentional Grounding: When my physical therapist stretches the muscles that have wound so tightly I cannot sit through Geometry class, much less a three- hour football game, she reminds me to breathe. I forget sometimes. So much can happen in that space. I’m afraid I will miss it. Years later, I have traded physical therapy for the mental variety, but the advice is the same. Breathe. 

Hail Mary: Full of grace. This pass is a prayer. I cannot count how often I have prayed over football, and sometimes this makes me blush. Does God care about this game? But I have seen too many miracles to give up asking. 

Touchback: No one remembers how John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” became the unofficial theme song of the season I traveled with the team. The last game takes us to Florida where, on a strangely gray day, we win a championship. I photograph the blustery beachside celebration, the trophy lifted above the waves, but this is not the picture that lingers. When we are nearly home again, someone at the back of the bus starts to sing. And then we are all singing, off-key: Country roads / take me home / to the place I belong. The music rolls us into the parking lot. The bus settles. Before the doors swing open and the cheers of the welcoming committee filter inside, we share the quiet. 

Field Position: One night, Dad asks us—my sister, my brother, me—who we are. Are we Chicagoans, Kentuckians, Iowans? Are we hard-weathered Midwesterners like him? Or soft-tongued Southerners after our mother?  We are neither. We are the crisp burn of autumn air and one hundred, measured yards. We are cartwheels on the fifty-yard line. We are churned turf and open sky and empty bleachers in the shape of a pitch-tent roof above our heads.

REBECCA FOX is an Orlando-based writer and proud coach’s kid. She attended Wheaton College (IL) and holds an MFA from the University of Central Florida, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Rebecca now works in nonprofit development.