Penalty Box Proposal: A Coach's Daughter Sports Romance (Hot Shots) by Lyssa Lemire

Author:Lyssa Lemire [Lemire, Lyssa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-28T18:30:00+00:00

17

LIAM

“Now, go to time seven minutes, thirty-eight seconds in the video. This is the kind of sloppy play we really need to make sure you shake off before you hit the pros. You won’t be able to get away with it there.”

I breathe in a slow, steady breath through grit teeth, trying to keep my cool.

“Alright, I’m watching,” I grunt out.

I’m on a phone call with my dad. After ignoring his calls for two days, I realized I couldn’t get away with putting it off anymore when he tried to call me three times in an hour. When I answered, he immediately sent me a link to an unlisted YouTube video he made of my plays during the last game.

Highlights? More like lowlights.

He personally edited a video of my worst moments during the game, and he’s insisting on us watching them all together so he can coach me on what I should have done differently.

The fact that he’s never played a lick of hockey in his life doesn’t stop him from thinking he’s an expert when it comes to identifying what I’ve done wrong on the ice and lecturing me about what I should do differently.

I try to go on auto-pilot and let my dad’s criticism go in one ear and out the other.

Frankly, it’s not even that relevant. Coach Gordon doesn’t coddle us, and any mistakes of ours he sees in a game, he drills into us both what we did wrong and what we should do differently in the future. I’m already getting plenty of coaching from, you know, my actual coach.

My dad’s mostly just looking for anything at all he can latch onto to criticize. If you’re determined to nitpick a player, you can find dozens of things in every game even if he’s the best player in the world.

Frankly, sometimes I think my dad’s so regretful that he didn’t get to live out the career he wanted as a pro athlete, that he’s desperate to involve himself any way he can in mine—and if he can’t provide any helpful advice, or guidance, or coaching, at least anyone can criticize.

“Now, look at this moment, son,” he says. “You had the shot. You could’ve made it. Or should’ve been able to, at least. But you passed it to a teammate instead, so that he could pad his stats.”

Is he kidding? Scoring a goal isn’t about padding your individual stats, it’s about helping your team win. Maybe I could’ve made the goal at the moment we’re looking at right now—I’ve made harder goals, and I’ve missed easier ones, too—but Ryder was lined up perfectly. Passing to him was the right thing to do for the team.

I open my mouth to tell him this, but the words die in my throat. Standing up to my dad is like trying to use a muscle I’ve never exercised.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say, absently, instead. When my dad starts hammering me with all my faults, I just default to what I’ve always done at those moments, clam up and wait for it to be over.

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