CARL

As Barb led the team, the girls called her “Coach.” Me, her assistant, I was just “Carl.” Barb knew soccer, how to make the girls exert themselves and love it. She, herself, could drop a corner kick five feet from the net.

Her assistant wasn’t as qualified, but was happy to help, cheering the girls on, reminding them to stay inbounds, talking up tournaments.

“Not until you see the ball in the air,” I’d say about a crossover, hoping they thought I’d known that before hearing Barb say it.

Win or lose, our girls were learning about working hard, thinking ahead, seeing themselves as winners. A few more years and they’d be off to college, probably done with the sport, but applying what we’d told them toward the arts, engineering, medicine, whatever they aimed for.

We made a great coaching duo, and the two of us plus a clutch of fourteen-year-olds made for good soccer.

My Kathy and her Andrea were best friends, but also happened to be a scoring machine. Kathy passing and Andrea slamming it in. Long pass, fake to the left, goal!

lt wasn’t as if the two got any advantages from being the coaches’ daughters, though. Coaching can’t have favorites.

It takes perseverance and footwork to pull off a victory, of course, but it also has to do with knowing boundaries.

“So here’s a question, your mathematicians,” Barb would ask them. “If a field’s a given area, but you move the touchlines in, how might that affect the attack?”

The touchline was the sideline, this I knew, football being more my frame of reference. There didn’t appear, however, to be any math geniuses that day.

“OK,” she helped them out. “What would that do to the distance between the goals?”

“The length would be less and we’d score faster,” from one who’d paid attention in algebra.

“So what, then, might happen if you moved the touchline in?”

“We’d score less,” from several.

“Not necessarily,” Coach’s point,” if we nailed our corner kicks. It’s all about using the boundaries.”

But there’s more to boundaries than just the field, and Barb and I were careful to respect them.

To be sure, the elements were in place for boundary crossings. Separated coach. Divorced assistant. The excitement of a game. Goal! The coaches hug more and more, even when there’s not one.

Sometimes when Barb was coming straight from work and nobody but the team was around, she’d just pull off her blouse and don her sweatshirt that said “Coach” in little flowers. The team bought it for her. It didn’t matter that I saw; we had our boundaries.

And OK, maybe I looked a little more when she changed close by, and maybe she even knew it, but it was just a temporary boundary adjustment.

For tournaments involving overnights, I’d of course have my own room and Barb would be with however many girls could pack into hers. No reason Kathy couldn’t share with me, of course, but she preferred to bunk with her friends.

If Barb brought a book to my room to escape the chatter, she’d sit on the other bed, maybe lay back and sometimes doze off, as I didn’t want to be the one to wake her up, I’d fetch the girls to do it. It’s all about boundaries.

Another example of boundary keeping: we’d sometimes have to crawl over each other to unpack the van — I was also the logistics coach, according to her — me careful in doing so for obvious reasons, but none the less at times ending up against parts of her I’d tried to avoid.

“Boundaries. We know ours.” Barb told me more than once, our unpacking having led us to such proximities.

At the end of practice, someone would yell, “American football,” and they’d chase Coach for a dogpile, after which they’d go for the assistant. There was no way that I’d not end up feeling a lot of fronts, but that’s how dogpiles are. Barb’s breasts were identifiable. The girls’, however, smaller and firmer, I couldn’t sometimes differentiate, except by their bras. Kathy’s of course I could because of living in the same house, and Andrea’s, by the crisscrossed straps. Every female, albeit coach or player, shows nipple through whatever they have on.

I could only hope that whoever was on me didn’t know it was me. They probably did, however, me the only male.

“Just so you know, I knew it was you,” Barb once laughed as we untangled, leaving me unsure about in which direction she was referring, me having had my arm around her front, and not much later, she perhaps having been the one between my legs. Had whoever it was been momentary, I’d have noticed less, but it was more than just being on me.

“All offense with no defense ends up getting scored back on,” she’d grinned.

The thing about being good coaches is that you can coach each other, and I needed a woman’s perspective regarding raising a daughter.

“I’m in bed and she comes in to tell me something,” another cause for concern, Barb’s advice being to move my butt over.

“But we’re just in pajamas,” to which Barb reminds me that nobody sleeps in her bra, and regarding me dressed for bed, as well, maybe understanding a possible implication, that I can turs to the side when we kiss goodnight.

“But she’s kissing me different at,” my conundrum, Barb’s explanation being that their lips get bigger as they grow

Or when Kathy stands behind me at the table, how she draws my head back against her. Barb’s thought: concentrate on my cereal.

Or when Kathy’s showering and I come in to brush my teeth -- she says it’s OK -- and the shower door’s not totally fogged. Barb’s advice: face the mirror so it won’t look like I’m noticing.

Or when Kathy and I watch TV, how she’ll get on my lap like when she was little, and when I put my arms around her, where they end up. Barb gave that one some thought. “In your pajamas?” to which I nodded and she said it’s nothing they don’t know about, anyway.

“She gooses me in the dogpile,”

“Like yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“And you sometimes react?”

“Maybe.”

“It wasn’t Kathy.”

At a tournament, we called a meeting before lights-out for my inspirational we-can-do-it speech, but before I’d even begun, someone yelled, “Lights out!” and, “American Football,” and it was a dogpile different from those on the field. Some of the girls were kissing – something girls do, of course – but not how they were doing it here. Some of them kissed me, even, but I don’t know who.

They were pulling things off that would never have been pulled off on the field. The lights being out, I’d not have known how much except I lost my sweatpants.

As for what else was happening, arms, legs, even hands, were all over me. Maybe I was on some of them, even, but it was in trying to defend myself. Without their sports bras, most of them felt different, but it wasn’t as if I was choosing whose I felt.

When we unscrambled, there I was, face down of Barb, where thankfully, she let me remain for a bit, though I doubt the girls would have seen how I’d become, the lights being out. Afterward, though, she informed me they were testing our boundaries.

“Busy city in our room afterwards,” she told me. “Smaller dogpiles.”