For a time fizzy, and golden in retrospect, we trained with Coach’s favorite boy on Coach’s favorite table. Just like Ryan, we served, pushed, blocked, and looped. We served pendulums forward and reverse, and a hooked Tomahawk that became the club’s specialty. We ran to the haunted yellow house and back. We were the Court One boys.
Every night at Coach’s club was the same. We arrived in the vehicles of parents or grandparents, or in Rahul’s case in the bus that trundled hourly up the hill, past the truck depot and the seafood warehouse. If we arrived before the blackout curtains came down, we stared out toward the cobalt mirror of the South Bay. We unpacked in the bleachers and fooled around until our two-mile run to the yellow house and back. We sat in a circle, crisscross applesauce, and counted up and down by increments to focus our minds: one-fourseven-ten . . . thirty-one, twenty-eight, twenty-five . . . one. Then it was grapevines and ladders and jump rope on the red polyester floor, freshest on our court; multiball, a hundred balls in a row served from a caddy behind our net, the sturdiest, attached to the brightest blue table, where we then rallied, served, and scrimmaged. We were the only ones whose strokes Coach deigned to correct himself, hand cold as he repositioned arm, wrist, elbow. Everyone else made do with the assistants who, having traveled far from their homes in Korea or China or, in one case, Nigeria, lacked Coach’s seamless authority and pulled you around too hard or not at all.