Page 17 of Spectacular Things
Winners and Quitters
“Do you know why I named you Mia?” Liz asks her older daughter, now fourteen, as they drive to pick up Cricket from the fancy indoor sports facility in Portland.
The coach of an elite soccer club, the Stallions, called Liz to invite Cricket to try out. He had heard Cricket’s name multiple times from “trusted sources,” by which he meant the overly invested parents of his current players.
“Because Mia Hamm is the best,” Mia says, preoccupied with the notice from the power company in her hands.
Eighth grade is hard enough without the extra work of trying to manage her mom’s utility bills, which she has been doing for years.
It isn’t the math—numbers come easily to Mia—it’s tracking down the bills themselves: She just found this one balled up in the glove compartment and already past due.
“Mia Hamm is the best, that’s true,” Liz acknowledges.
“But what people don’t realize is that Mia Hamm was also the ultimate team player.
” Sensing the gravity of the conversation, Mia sits up in her seat and devotes her full attention to her mother, who launches into yet another soccer speech about the famous ’99er.
“Sure, Mia Hamm scored a ton of goals and was the nucleus of the National Team, the humble hero,” Liz continues. “Oh look! It’s eleven-eleven—make a wish!” She is talking too much and too fast—Mia feels her heartbeat pick up speed as she waits to see where this lecture is going.
“But she was also the leader in assists,” Liz says. “Did you know that?”
Mia shakes her head.
“She sacrificed so much of her own glory to lift up the entire team,” Liz explains. “And that generosity is why I thought she was worthy of naming my firstborn daughter after her.”
“Mom?”
“I need your help with Cricket,” Liz confesses, keeping her eyes on the road and flicking on her blinker. “If she makes this team, it’s a big deal, but it’ll be logistically impossible unless I can count on you to step up.”
“I’m fourteen.”
“You’re Mia Lowe,” Liz says. “You’re brilliant and you can do anything.”
“But what—”
“There’s this phrase, ‘pay to play,’?” Liz says as they drive over the drawbridge and into the city.
“It’s shorthand for the fact that a kid needs to come from money to make it in sports—most definitely for college and professional, but even in high school.
I mean, look at this place.” They take in the several stories of glass, the heated domes, the invisible millions that built the sports complex.
They eye the luxury cars in the parking lot that stand guard like sentries.
“I don’t want Cricket—or you—to ever lose out on an opportunity because of money.”
“How am I supposed to pay for Cricket to play soccer?” Mia asks, barely hiding her repulsion. “I’m fourteen!” she repeats.
“I know you are, honey, and I don’t expect you to pay for soccer, but I need to get a second job, at night, so we can afford more things in general, which means I would need you to pick up the pieces at home—dinner, laundry, making sure Cricket does her homework.”
“Oh.”
“I know,” Liz says, merging onto the highway. “It’s not fair. I know that and I’m so sorry. But I can’t figure out any other way to make this work.”
Mia flashes back to the thousands of diapers she’s changed, the sleep she’s lost and the hours she’s logged comforting, entertaining, and indulging her baby sister. The electricity bill is still in her hands, her own soccer bag in the back of the car. “Will I still play? For my team?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t desperate,” Liz says, either ignoring or not hearing Mia’s question. Tears plummet silently from her cheeks to her lap. Three things about Liz Lowe: She never curses, she never arrives on time, and ever since their first midnight plunge, she never cries.
“I’ll do it,” Mia says, realizing what this implicitly means. Her own soccer career is over. There won’t be time to play if her mom needs her to cover the home front.
Liz looks at her, nods until she’s confident in her voice. “Thank you,” she musters, and she sounds so fractured that Mia feels sick with shame that she attempted to resist.
Even if Cricket doesn’t deserve her sacrifice, her mother does.
Liz reaches over and squeezes Mia’s hand.
Staring at their fingers intertwined, Mia understands the inextricable braid between love and sacrifice.
Then she looks at the clock and tells her mom what she always tells her: “We’re really late. ”
—
Halfway through the Stallions tryout, the head coach asks Cricket, “What’s your favorite position to play?”
“All of them,” Cricket says. She is nine years old and revels in every aspect of soccer the same way she appreciates every flavor of ice cream, every kind of candy, every episode of Friends because of how much her mom laughs each time Joey enters a scene.
Cricket is an equal opportunist—anything she is lucky enough to experience becomes her immediate favorite.
“What about goalkeeper?”
“I love it!” Cricket exclaims, oblivious to the weight of his inquiry. “I like coming off the line and surprising attackers,” she says with a widening grin. “Because it’s actually more like scaring them.”
“Great,” Coach says, offering Cricket a fist bump.
“You have more sense than the rest of them.” The previous season, which was Coach’s first year out of college and first time with the Stallions, he didn’t have an established keeper.
Instead, he’d forced every player to take a turn in goal, which resulted in weekly tears and a middling record.
But Coach sees outsize potential in Cricket Lowe—not just for her own career but also for his.
At twenty-two years old, he’s meant to be coaching young men, not little girls.
But here he is, doing more coaxing than coaching because Major League Soccer hired someone else.
He’d made it through three rounds of interviews with the New England Revolution before he found out he’d lost the spot to a guy vaguely related to Ronaldinho.
Politics.
It always comes down to politics.
Coach has no choice but to stick with the girls for now, so he’ll make them winners like any legitimate coach would.
An undefeated record will help him negotiate the terms of his contract with MLS next year when a staff vacancy undoubtedly opens up.
Standing in front of him now is the missing piece to his puzzle: a keeper.
“Want to step in goal?” Coach asks.
Five shots in, he understands what he has on his hands.
Cricket Lowe is a talented goalkeeper in the rough.
He smiles as he chips shots and tells her, “Well done,” while she adjusts her movements to his critiques.
It doesn’t matter that Cricket is a nine-year-old girl.
She’s good, really good, and Coach is going to make her great.
Herein lies the inherent beauty of coaching: seeing promise, cultivating it, and encouraging it, until you teach yourself right out of a job.
“I played goalkeeper through college,” Coach tells Cricket as they wait for her mom to pick her up.
They kill the clock with a goaltending exercise called the three-cone drill.
“And we’re goalkeepers, by the way, not goalies,” Coach says.
“Goalies are just children using their hands; goalkeepers are the conductors of the field, and I think you could make one hell of a conductor.”
“Let me guess,” Cricket says. She breathes heavily as she runs backward for the drill, but her panting does not diminish her audacity. “Because you need a goalkeeper? Or because I’m tall?”
Coach laughs with genuine surprise. He’s not used to such bluntness from a third grader. The rest of his players speak to him with a little more reverence, a little less certainty. “Your height definitely helps, and we need a keeper,” he allows. “But do you know what makes a great goalkeeper?”
Cricket shakes her head.
“An internal M-A-P—a map—which stands for Mentality, Adaptability, Patience. You’re brave and agile and vocal and strong—all the qualities of an exceptional goalkeeper.”
Cricket doesn’t blush or shrink from these compliments but rather lifts her chin to meet them like a cat emerging from the shadows to sun herself.
“Most of all,” Coach continues, “I get the feeling that you understand the responsibility that comes with the position, the sacrifice required.”
Cricket nods, taking in this information and accepting her fate with pleasure. “So should I get my own gloves or what?”
—
Two days later, Coach calls to congratulate Cricket—she’s made the team.
The day after that, Liz fills out paperwork for her second job and takes Mia on a tour of the two supermarkets within walking distance to show her which store has the best deals for what and how to maximize coupon codes.
Mia goes a step further and creates a spreadsheet to help them keep track of their spending.
Within a few weeks, however, she notices she’s the only one who inputs her receipts.
Cricket, too, must step up. Liz makes it clear to her younger daughter that she is responsible for securing rides to and from the games and practices that coincide with Liz’s work schedule.
It’s an easy ask compared to Mia’s but still a daunting task for a nine-year-old.
Nonetheless, Cricket makes the calls, even when it requires talking to dads on landlines.
Together, they rally. Together, they forge ahead. Together, they pay for Cricket to play because they’re Lowes, not quitters.
Except for Mia, who unceremoniously stops playing soccer.
According to her former teammates, she is the epitome of a quitter.
In the school hallways and cafeteria, they stick out their bottom lips and beg her to come back.
“We need you!” they say after their first Saturday game, which resulted in their first loss of the season.
When their charm offensive doesn’t yield results, the girls stop trying to recruit Mia and instead cast her off.
They remove her from the team email. They block her on Gchat.
They ignore her at the lunch table. They treat her like she left them to play for another team, which in a way, she did: Team Lowe.
Mia gets through the social ice-out by summoning the strength of her namesake.
Mia Hamm gave up her own goals to make her teammates look good, and that’s what she is doing, too, because family is the ultimate team anyway, and she will lead in assists.
Exiting the cafeteria alone, Mia reminds herself that Cricket’s success and her mother’s happiness are only possible through her sacrifice.