Matched By My Rival by DJ Jamison
2
PARKER
Practice was brutal. Without daily field practice, my body felt sluggish. Combined with too much beer and not enough sleep, optimal performance wasn’t even a blip on the radar. I held up better than some of the guys. Cruz puked on the sidelines, and Johnston looked like death warmed over. Still, Coach Jackson might have overlooked it—if Smith hadn’t walked in late and Jacobs hadn’t been a no-show.
To say our head coach was unhappy was an understatement.
He prowled before us on the sideline, having ended our drills early. “Is this how much you care about your future, gentleman? You show up to my field, not even fit to call yourselves football players! This isn’t high school. This isn’t a hobby. This may be college, but this is not the amateur hour. You are athletes, competitors.” He scoffed. “I expected self-discipline from you. Foolishly, maybe, but I will get it before the week is through.” His gaze landed on me and weighed heavily. I knew he’d expected more from me. “This field, this game may not be forever for you. It’s a loooong shot to the pros, and talent is only a tiny piece of that pie. This is temporary for some of you, I understand. But while you are here, you will give this team all you’ve got, and in return you will leave with a college education, discipline you can use for the rest of your lives, and a healthy body in peak physical condition.”
He paused, raising an eyebrow, and we obliged by calling out, “Yes, Coach.”
“I won’t tolerate sloppy, hungover players. I have no patience for bullshit,” he added gruffly. Coach was not one to sugarcoat anything. “Since you all have so much time on your hands, you’ll be committing to five hours of volunteer service a week. Get your choices approved by Coach Martinez. You’ll be reporting your hours to him weekly. You don’t do your volunteer work, you’re benched.”
He came to a stop directly in front of me. “I expected more of you, Reed.”
I nodded once. “Yes, Coach.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about your personal hang-ups,” he added while staring me in the eye, and I tried my best not to wince. My relationship with Coach had been rocky since he let Simon go. I’d fought hard for Prentiss, hard enough I was pretty sure Coach would have cut me too just to get me out of his hair, were it not for the fact he didn’t want to lose his two best wide receivers in one fell swoop. During that skirmish, I may have told Coach I didn’t care about football the way Prentiss did. He hadn’t appreciated my candor. “While on this team, you’re mine, and you will go big, or you will go home.”
Coach moved on to another player and another, targeting a few of us to vent a little more of his displeasure. Eventually, when the air was thick with disappointment, he dismissed us to shower and change.
The locker room was quieter than usual when we straggled in, beaten down by our first drill in weeks and Coach’s tongue lashing. No trash talking, joking, or laughing echoed off the walls. We stripped, quietly, and stepped into the showers. I lathered and rinsed quickly, eager to move on to breakfast. My stomach rumbled as I grabbed a towel.
“What’s this crap about volunteering?” Bryan Smith complained by his locker. “I barely find time to sleep.”
“Must be why you were late today,” Darnell Davidson said wryly, making me snort.
“What are you laughing at, Reed?” Smith groused. “Coach zeroed in on you too.”
“Yep,” I said as I opened my locker and withdrew a pair of track pants and a hoodie. I didn’t bother with underwear. “We all fucked up.” I paused. “Well, not all of us. Double D is a good boy.”
Darnell—who’d received the nickname Double D partly because he wasn’t the only Davidson on the team—flipped me off. “Man, fuck you. I just knew today would be brutal, and my ass wasn’t stupid enough to add a hangover to the mix.”
I smiled. “My mom would like you.”
“I can give her a call.” He waggled his brows. “But how do you know I haven’t already?”
“Walked right into that one,” I said as snickers went up around us. Double D was a good egg, though, and I didn’t take his trash talk seriously. If you could even call it trash talk. Pretty tame by college jock standards.
Smith continued to whine while I pulled on my clothes. “Where the hell are we s’posed to do this volunteer work anyway? We’ve got workouts, drills, game footage to review. Not to mention fucking study hall hours. And now this?”
“Suck it up,” our QB, Holmes, ordered. “There’s plenty of things going on around campus. The Greeks do charities, and I’m sure there are some other organizations too. I’ll get a list together for us, and you guys can sign up for something.”
“This is supposed to be the fucking off-season,” another player grumbled. “Coach still has to own all our time.”
Holmes scoffed. “Five hours a week is easy. I thought he might give us ten.”
“He’s done this before?” Davidson asked.
Holmes laughed. “You should have been here my freshman year. Ugly man. Just ugly.”
I slammed my locker door after stuffing my things inside. “You want to be a player, you gotta play the game.”
If anyone knew those words to be true, it had to be Simon Prentiss. He’d failed to play by the rules, and he’d lost everything.
I almost envied him.
* * *
SIMON
I bumped fists with Darnell when I arrived for my Sports Leadership class. “What’s up? You look glum.”
“Isn’t that my line?” He rumbled a deep laugh. “You’ve been one glum motherfucker since the day I met you.”
Sports Leadership was one of my smaller classes, with four rows of five desks and only half of those filled—a far cry from the lecture halls with risers to allow for a hundred-plus students to attend. Darnell was sitting in the middle of the third row, right beside my usual seat one row to the left. After everything went down with the team, I’d tried moving, but Darnell had just shifted seats so that he was beside me—even when I was a dick about it.
That was loyalty, and my boy Double D had it in extra measure. I’d finally given up and secretly been happy to continue being desk buddies. Though I had the frat, I missed having teammates.
Today, his eyes lacked their usual good humor. I dropped my backpack to the floor and folded into my too-small desk-slash-chair torture device. These seats were not made for big guys, and Darnell looked even more ridiculously uncomfortable than I was.
“Glum is my default,” I said. Even when I’d been on the team, I was too broody for most of the guys. “What’s your excuse?”
“Coach ripped us a new one, is all. Nothing you want to hear about.”
“I guess there’s one silver lining to getting my ass booted.”
Professor Jennings stepped to the front of the class just then, beginning the lecture. She was a slender, petite woman, but she’d soon shown us that she was every bit the athlete we were. She’d once been a professional gymnast on the Olympic track before an injury took her out of consideration.
Fucking injuries.Maybe they got us all in the end, and I’d just been lucky to get my ass booted for fighting before my body could break down entirely.
This class was primarily focused on leadership and programming in athletics. We learned principles that could be applied to teams, events, or facilities. It was one of the required courses for the “sports management” focus of my business degree. Our school was too small to offer the sports degree all on its own, but it could be paired with business and/or one of the exercise science programs like kinesiology. A lot of guys took it as an elective, even if they were majoring in other areas, because anything sports-related was of interest.
The jury was out on how far my degree could actually take me. I’d once hoped to benefit from Coach’s connections—assuming I didn’t get drafted, what a joke that dream seemed now—but I’d burned that bridge when I decked Reed. Once the video went viral, I was toast. I got read the riot act about how I wasn’t a team player, how I was selfish and impulsive, and how I’d cast shame on the entire football program.
I wasn’t proud of that chapter in my life or what followed. I’d yelled. I’d thrown a tantrum worthy of any two-year-old. I’d apologized; I’d groveled. At the end, I’d even cried.
It hadn’t mattered. I was done.
And just like that, my dream was gone—and cold, hard reality had taken its place.
A business degree with an emphasis in sports management would get me a job. But without any contacts in the sports world, it wouldn’t be a position working with an NFL team; it wouldn’t be scouting for a major sports organization. It probably wouldn’t even be a stadium management job. No, with the way things stood now, I’d be lucky to supervise a gym or push paper for a community rec league.
“I want to talk about your final projects today,” Jennings said, recapturing my attention. “I know, I know. Finals feel ages away. But this is a big deal, and I want you to start thinking now.”
“Here we go,” Darnell grumbled. He was a top-notch athlete and a hell of a good guy, but he did not enjoy academics.
Jennings continued. “There’s a lot of room for creativity here, but you’ll also need to think out of the box. I want you to consider what’s lacking in the sports industry. This could be at the professional, collegiate, even high school levels. What voids exist in programming, in leadership? Is there a need for better transition prep from high school to college, for example? Or better academic support in high school? Or maybe it’s something more ingrained than that.” Jennings’s eyes shifted to one of the female track stars in the class. “Is it how women are treated, differences in leadership approaches or standards? Or LGBT athletes? The sky is the limit.”
I jotted a few notes down as Professor Jennings continued her spiel. My mind was already whirling, ideas beginning to take shape as I noted the criteria I’d need to meet. A lanky basketball player raised his hand. “Professor Jennings?”
Jennings glanced over the rims of her wire glasses, which gave her a stern librarian vibe. “What is it, Mr. Jones?”
“I was wondering, is this, like, a paper we write, or an oral presentation, or…”
“Yes, I was just about to get to that.” The professor didn’t tell Eric Jones he should have been patient, but you could hear it in her tone. I smirked as she continued. “This might turn into an analytical report, or it might develop into a visual presentation, or heck, one year, a student created an entire curriculum that they felt belonged in sports education. The thing you must do, though, is not only raise a concern, but also answer it. That is what leadership is all about. You must know how to identify strengths and weaknesses in a team or a facility or a program, and then work to enhance the advantages and shore up shortcomings.”
Jennings answered a few more anxiety-laced questions before dismissing us. As class wrapped up, Darnell turned a wary gaze on me. “Man, what the hell are we supposed to do? That project is no joke.”
I nodded. “Yeah, it’s not a cakewalk.”
Darnell scoffed. “Pfft, you already have an idea, don’t you?”
My lips quirked. “I just heard the assignment. How would I have an idea already?”
There were some thoughts trying to coalesce in my mind. Losing football had been hard, really hard. Not only because I’d lost financial aid, though that was a big part of it. I’d also lost friends, lost my sense of belonging.
Lost myself, really.
I wasn’t sure yet what shape my project would take. But I knew that all my upheaval this year would influence it. There had to be more that athletic departments could do for students who’d given years to their program—even if they fucked up like me.
“Nah, I see that smart brain whirring away,” Darnell said as we packed up our notebooks and prepared to leave. “Just do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Give me your castoff ideas? Because I’ve got no idea what the fuck I’m gonna do.”
“Relax, Double D. You’ve got this. You’re already a leader. Just think about the team, think about all you do for your teammates.”
“How’s that s’posed to help?”
I shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe there’s something you’re trying to make up for that isn’t being handled by the coaching staff? Maybe there’s something you want from football you’re not getting.”
Darnell didn’t look any more convinced. His brow creased, and his face looked pained enough that I added with a smirk, “Or I’ll just give you one of my castoff ideas.”
He sagged with relief. “Thanks, man. This brainy shit makes my head hurt. I like sports, or else I wouldn’t be in them. How am I supposed to be smarter than the coaches?”
I laughed. “Your problem is you’re too content with life. You need to start carrying a chip on your shoulder like me and these things will come easier.”
He looked skeptical. “If you say so. I’d rather be happy than smart.”
I snorted. “You are smart, man. You’re in college.”
“Whatever you say,” he said, but a bit of his usual spark returned. “Wanna meet up for a poker game tonight? Apparently, there’s a wild game in the dorm where all the art kids stay. You know those girls get freaky.” He waggled his brows. “Could be some fun, sexy stakes if money runs low.”
I laughed and shook my head as we left the classroom, pausing before we each went our own way. “I have to work, but you have fun.”
“I always do.”
With a sigh, I thought of the work shift ahead I’d promised to cover for Rhett. I wasn’t really in the mood for sexy artistic girls anyway—as evidenced by the hours I’d spent scrolling through the Thrust hookup app, checking out pics of guys last night. But I wasn’t looking forward to the late hours on my feet, either, or the pounding headache I’d surely carry back to my room at the frat, where I’d crash into my lumpy narrow bed, exhausted, sexually frustrated, and as always, alone.