They piled into the van one by one, most angry and, despite my most recent lecture on personal hygiene, very smelly.

I turned the keys in the van, immediately turning the radio down from what had been meant to energize us an hour prior. The heat fired loudly from the air vents. I left them on, even though they were blistering for me, I knew it would take time for that same warmth to reach the furthest seats in the back.

Finally, the last of the boys crawled in. Yasir, the tiniest 8^th grader you’d ever laid eyes on, struggled to get the door closed. KJ, the only member of the Lindley Boys’ Basketball Team that might give Yasir a run for tiniest, jumped in to assist his teammate.

The door slammed shut after extended effort and silence fell over the van.

The silence lingered for a moment, as I thought on whether to talk with the boys now or save it. I decided the silence might be a more effective teacher, and I clicked the van into gear.

As we hit the freeway, there were still no words, just the shuffling of bags as many dug around to find headphones to drown out the stifle of the frustration.

The sound of hand against metal thudded from the back, followed by a muttered curse. I heard it in the front, but it was only audible due to the severe quiet and only meant as a personal utterance, so I let it go without rebuke.

“Coach, can we still make play-offs?” said a meek voice from the back, my only 7^th grader named Tee choosing to speak up.

It was a fair question. Coaching a team of primarily eight graders, all with a singular goal to make the playoffs for the first time in their middle school careers, this was a constant rumination. It was an answer trickier than you might imagine, especially for a team such as ours that teetered on the bubble with every win and loss. This question after a loss like we’d just suffered was all the more delicate.

I chewed on it for a moment, knowing full-well this game we’d let slip through our fingers might well have spelled the end of these hopes. But that wasn’t the right answer now.

“Yo, shut up! Nobody should be talking about the playoffs now!” said KJ, angrily.

I resisted the urge to step in, reminding myself that I was not coach right now but playing the role of bus driver. A team needs time to grow. I, as bus driver, held my tongue for the moment.

“You hardly were off the bench!” chimed in another bench player, Saakhi.

“So!” said Tee, now defensive, “What’s that matter? Neither were you! And I’m just asking a question!”

“Yeah, a dumb question!” fired back Saakhi, “Coach is probably annoyed and doesn’t want to answer that stupid-ness. We didn’t run anything right at the end of the game, so just shut up!”

I was about to step in, the hostility making it harder and harder for me to hold my tongue.

“Bro chill out, will you?! Remember what coach said about if we lose, we don’t get to say anything mean about teammates. We family man!”

I held a smile back as I merged lanes. This was Namir, one of the captains on the teams, named as such due to his level head and ability to solve conflicts.

“That was one of our best games. If we had played like that against Tacony or Pan American, you know how good our record would be?”

Quiet was the only answer Namir got for a moment.

“Yo, it doesn’t matter,” said Mateo, “we still lost! Who cares what our record could’ve been? It’s not!”

“Yeah, but Mateo,”

While the silence remained, I could hear a shift. Attention was going to a new speaker, one that didn’t speak often, and history said when he did, it often only brought more conflict.

It was Zeon, perhaps my most skilled player, but one that I had spent years teaching about resilience, sportsmanship, and harnessing emotions.

“at least now we know how to fix it! We just have to do it!

“Bro, we still lost though!” said Mateo.

I was about to speak, about to correct Mateo’s line of thinking but stopped once again. I was frustrated by how right and how wrong he was in this moment, something I myself had failed to grasp so many times as a kid, but Zeon was starting to see.

We were beginning to lose like winners, and that was a start.

We pulled into the parking lot of the school and began to disembark.

“Coach,” came KJ’s voice, “can we go into the gym and run through the end of game scenario a few times?”

“Who?” I asked

The entire team, bags at their sides, raised their hands.

“Alright,” I said with a smile, “I’ll watch. You guys run it.”

I followed behind them, into the school, running through all the scenarios and drills I could put them through but wouldn’t.

It had dawned on me, not for the first time, how the hardest part about coaching wasn’t knowing the plays, or having the right speech, or even putting out the correct line-up; the hardest part about coaching was knowing when not to.

So, the bus driver opened the door to the gymnasium and let the Lindley Boys’ Basketball Team in for practice.