“We got three practices left before the next meet. Today, tomorrow, and Thursday. Then it’s go time. If you came here to play around”—he looked at Lu, the instigator—“when Saturday comes, don’t cry when I don’t run you. If you came to be lazy, I’ll make sure you have a comfortable seat this weekend at the meet. Are we clear?” We all nodded. “It’s Technique Tuesday. I watched some of your forms break down last week, out there looking like wet noodles. I don’t wanna see that this week. Let’s keep it tight.” He tucked his elbows in, stuck his chest out. “Keep your stride wide, and remember to breathe. Come off the block like you got a point to prove.” Coach then told the relay teams what Coach Whit had already told us at the last practice—that we would also be working on baton passing. Thankfully, he didn’t mention dancing.
Me, Brit-Brat, Krystal, and Deja went off to one end of the track with Coach Whit. She was holding small orange cones. Not the kind that you see at construction sites, or in school cafeterias whenever there was a spill. These were small. Where the heck do you even get such tiny cones? If Maddy saw them, she’d want them for pretend megaphones.
“Okay, ladies, I need you all to pay attention, because what I’m gonna show you could make or break you,” she said.
Then Whit placed one of the cones just before the curve on the track, and another, I don’t know, maybe twenty feet into the curve. “This is the handoff zone,” she said, coming back from the second cone. “Or as Coach calls it, the hot zone. This is the amount of space you have to hand off the baton. Now, I know the three of y’all”—Whit pointed to Krystal, Deja, and Brit-Brat—“are used to standing at the starting line with your arm out waiting for the stick, but this year Coach and I have decided to shake things up. You’re going to run the eight-hundred relay as if it were a one hundred relay.”
We looked at Whit like she had grown a second head. Once she realized that none of us understood what she was talking about, she explained, “What I mean is, we’re gonna do blind handoffs.”
“Wait, what you mean, blind?” Deja asked.
“Now she ’bout to blindfold us, y’all,” Krystal joked.
“No, I’m about to show y’all how to win. That is, if you can shut up and listen. Especially you, Krystal, seeing as though you run the slowest leg.” Krystal sucked her teeth, burned. Probably would’ve sucked her teeth hard enough to turn her whole face inside out if she could.
“Now, watch and learn,” Whit said, and started demonstrating the blind handoff, a technique that usually only sprinters do during relays because of the momentum of the incoming runner. The runner who’s receiving the baton has to time it exactly right, start sprinting before the runner with the baton reaches the line. So there’s no slowdown.
“This is why I had you dance, ladies,” Coach Whit was saying, moving Krystal and me to imaginary positions on the track. “Now, Krystal, you’re coming in fast.”
“Wait, we’re running the eight hundred, not the four hundred,” Brit-Brat said.
“So?”
“So . . . I mean, how fast do you really expect us to be coming in? By the time I get to the final stretch, I’m rigged. This is the hardest race to run,” Brit-Brat argued, her arms spread wide, as if, what the? I nodded, thinking the exact same thing. The eight hundred ain’t no dash.
“As fast as you possibly can. Our job is to run to win. If that means you have to run until your legs detach from your body, then that’s what you do.” Whit’s face went dead serious. “Because the rest of your relay team is depending on you. Got it?” Brit nodded sheepishly. So did I. Coach Whit wasn’t playing no games today.
“So, Krystal, pretend you’re coming in, final stretch,” Coach Whit gave Krystal the baton, stood beside her. “You want to line your right arm up with Patty’s left shoulder. Now, whoever’s receiving has the hard job, because they have to time the transition. In this case, it’s Patty. When you see Krystal about to enter the red zone, where this cone is, you gotta take off, full speed. If you wait too long, you two will collide and get jumbled. If you go too early, the person passing the baton won’t be able to catch up to hand it off. Make sense?” We all nodded.
“Now,” she went on, “what this means for the incoming runner is that you have to dig deep and run with everything you got on that final stretch, because once you yell out, ‘Stick!’ you still have to run fast enough to catch the next runner, who will have her arm out, but will also have fresh legs. So we all have to feel each other out. Know when to go. Know when to hand off. It’s waltzing without touching. Just moving in rhythm. Now let’s run it slow-mo a few times.”
Coach Whit moved Krystal back twenty more feet and told her to jog toward me. Once Krystal got to the first cone, I started jogging. “Good,” Coach Whit said. “Now call it!”
“Stick,” Krystal said, no oomph behind it.
“No.” Whit thrust her arm out across the Krystal’s body like Momly does to me after slamming on the brakes. “I said, call it. Not say it.” Whit took the baton and stepped back a few feet. “Stick! Stick!” she shouted, running toward us. “People are going to be screaming. You need to make sure your teammate hears you. Now, run it again.”
When “stick” is called out, my job is to stretch my left arm behind me, without looking, while running full speed until Krystal slaps the baton in my hand. It’s tricky, because our running has to match up. She has to have enough juice and enough time to get to me.
We ran it again and again, faster and faster, working on the timing of it all. Deja had to practice the handoff to Brit-Brat, and Brit-Brat had to practice the handoff to Krystal.
“Now remember, these cones won’t be on the track. So you’re gonna have to learn to eyeball when the transition should happen,” Whit said, picking them up. “This time, full speed. Run it.”
She told Deja to start back at the two-hundred-meter mark, outside lane, and do the handoff to Brit-Brat. It wasn’t bad. Then she had Brit-Brat do the same to practice the handoff to Krystal.
“Stickstickstickstick!” was Brit-Brat’s way of calling out, which made us all laugh, even Whit. But, hey, whatever works. Next it was my turn to receive the handoff from Krystal, but when she reached the red zone, and I broke out running, she couldn’t catch me.
“Try it again,” Whit said. So we did, and I got out too far ahead of her again. I wasn’t trying to, but she’s just . . . slower.
“Yo, what you tryna do?” Krystal asked, panting.
“What you talkin’ ’bout? I’m waiting on you to call it out,” I explained.
“No, you tryna play me,” she said. “You over-running.”
“Over-running? That ain’t even a thing. Maybe you under-running—”
Coach Whit cut us off. “You two, cut it out and get back on your mark. Save that drama for the other teams on Saturday.”
But Krystal wasn’t ready to be cut off. Maybe it was because Curron snapped on her and Whit threw her a little shade earlier, but now Krystal was fuming. “Nah. See, I try to be nice to the new girl”—she looked around at Brit and Deja, all fired up—“but she always correcting me. And being all goody-goody, like she think she better than us.” She raised her chin at me. “What make you better? Your white mother?”
My white . . . mother? Ohhhh . . .
“What?” My left eye twitched, a sign that things were going to go bad if Krystal didn’t shut up. Nobody had ever tried to call me out about Momly before. Nobody had the nerve to even pretend to know something they really ain’t know nothing about. Until now.
“You heard me.” Krystal didn’t shut up.