Page 40 of Kicking It with the Point Guard

I pull my phone out and shoot Oscar a text. He responds quickly with the section and seat number. He’s in the student section.

The smells of the concession stand waft over me, and I almost get in line. But my nerves at being here for the first time, and the anxiety that I won’t be able to find Oscar amongst all these people, has me moving my feet once more.

It takes me a few minutes, but I finally spot Oscar’s imposing figure amongst the other students. He waves at me, and I join him. He’s saved me a seat, for which I’m grateful. The student section is packed, and I can’t imagine being here by myself.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Oscar says, leaning down closer to my ear so I can hear him over the roar of the students.

The two teams are on the court, warming up, and cheerleaders line both ends, stretching and chatting and shaking their pompoms absentmindedly.

I spot Allyson. She’s got one leg propped up against the wall in a vertical split, and she’s scanning the student section.

My legs and lady parts hurt just watching her.

Her gaze lands on me, and she frowns, then turns to say something to Lindsay, who is stretching beside her. Lindsay says something back and smirks. Allyson laughs.

I shift uncomfortably and tear my gaze away from them. They can’t do anything to me from where they are, and they’ll be too busy cheering to focus on me. I look through the orange and black jerseys until I see Cameron’s caramel blond hair.

He’s lazily dribbling at the top of the three-point line, talking to a tanned guy with dark hair.

The dark-headed guy shoots, and it bounces off the rim. He grimaces and moves somewhere else. One of guys under the basket catches his miss and throws it back to him.

Cameron shoots then, his movements fluid and practiced. His arm extends, and he flicks his wrist, watching the ball all the way to the basket. It glides through the net and into the waiting hands of one of his teammates below. He’s moved around the three-point line, shooting one three after another before he moves inside the line and continues to make shot after shot.

“He’s good, isn’t he?” Oscar leans down again, a smile on his face. “If we play one-on-one, I have to be rough to even stand a chance at winning.”

“He makes it look easy,” I say, nodding.

We don’t have to wait much longer for the game to start, and soon, both teams are gathered around their coach.

The announcer calls out the five starters from each team, and everyone else sits on the chairs that are set up next to the court.

A referee walks out to the middle of the court, ball in hand, and two guys, one from each team, stand on either side of the half-court line, one hand behind their back. The rest of the starters find spots behind their middleman.

I thought Cameron was tall, but both of the middlemen are at least half a foot taller than him, if not more. They look like giants compared to the ref.

I lean toward Oscar. “Why are athletes so huge?”

He chuckles. “Not all athletes are big.”

I look at him skeptically, but a whistle draws my attention back to the court. The referee tosses the ball up. The tall men jump, and the one from Fox University gets to it first.

He hits it behind him, right to Cameron, who starts dribbling immediately. He crosses the half court line and then pauses but doesn’t stop dribbling. He holds up a hand and makes a gesture that I can’t quite make out. Everyone starts moving.

Dribbling to the right side of the court, he passes the ball before running off in another direction to stand in front of one of the guys on the other team. A Fox University player runs around Cameron, and the guy on the other team who was following him bumps into Cameron, shoving him away. Cameron follows the guy and gets the ball again, dribbling closer to the basket and passing it between the legs of the tall guy on the other team to our tall guy, who catches it, jumps, and slams it into the goal.

All of that takes place in less than twenty seconds. I suddenly realize why Cameron is always so tired during our study sessions. There are still nineteen minutes and forty seconds on the scoreboard.

If that much movement happened in twenty seconds, I can’t imagine what’s going to happen for the rest of these twenty minutes.

“How long are these games?” I ask Oscar after the cheers die down from the basket we scored.

“It’s two twenty-minute halves. They get about twenty minutes for halftime. But they have several TV timeouts, and each team gets three thirty-second timeouts and one sixty-second timeout.”

Dang… that’s intense.

The student section roars when the other team misses a three-point shot right before a buzzer goes off.

“What’s that buzzer for?” There’s still a little over nineteen minutes on the clock.

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