Free Football Genius (2007) by Tim Green Page A

her finger in the direction of his room.
    Troy clenched his hands and said, "You want me to own up? You own up. This is something I can do. Maybe it's the one thing he gave me, and you want to stop it!"
    "You're twelve years old," his mom said, pressing her lips tight.
    "Seth doesn't care," Troy said, pointing at the player. "He says I can do it."
    He saw his mother's expression soften, her eyes tugging down at their outside corners.
    "It could be an incredible thing," Seth said in a quiet voice. "I'm not trying to make trouble."
    His mom put her hands on her hips. She took a deep breath and let it out through her nose.
    "Okay," she said, turning to Seth and jabbing her finger in the air, "but you have to tell them I had nothing to do with this."
    "Come on, Troy," Seth said, stepping past Troy's mom and swinging open the door, "before she changes her mind."
    They almost bowled Tate over as she came up the steps with her own football in hand.
    "Hi, Troy," she said stiffly, her wide eyes glued to Seth Halloway. "Do. You. Want. To. Play. Some. Football?"
    "Hey," Seth said, "a girl. Cool."
    Tate grinned at him and held out the ball and a Sharpie pen. Seth looked at Troy and half his mouth curled up into a smile.
    "You play with a Sharpie?" Seth asked, whipping off his signature.
    "She's the kicker on my team," Troy said.
    Tate puffed out her chest and said, "Eighty percent on extra points. Fifty-four on field goals, with a twenty-six yarder last season."
    "Twenty-six?" Seth said, letting out a low whistle and handing her back the ball. "We should sign you."
    Troy winked at Tate and climbed up into the shiny H2. Tate stood with his mom on the porch and waved to him. He waved back, and off they went down the dusty red clay drive.
    At the team complex, Seth waved to the guard and they pulled into the players' empty parking lot. Seth led him through the locker room. Troy drank in the smell of leather gloves and shoes and the plastic smell from shoulder pads and helmets and the nylon of practice jerseys. It was a clean, sharp smell, nothing like the sweaty smell in the gym lockers at school. Over each locker was a nameplate. Lock-8. Brooking-56. Kerney-97. Crumpler-83.
    Small stools stood in front of the lockers; each locker was the size of Troy's clothes closet at home. On the locker shelves were bottles of pills, ointments, and cologne. Uniforms hung limp from hooks and hangers over piles of turf shoes. Each player must have had a dozen pairs.
    Troy touched his face, trying to bring back the feeling.
    "Here, look," Seth said, stopping at his own locker and taking out a three-ring binder. He opened it and pointed to a sheet of paper covered with numbers. "It's a spreadsheet. You read it like a graph. All the different formations across the top and then the different field positions down the side. You see where they intersect and it gives you the percentage of the time they pass in that situation."
    "Why are some of the numbers circled?" Troy asked, pointing at one of the numbers circled in red ink.
    "I circle everything over seventy-five percent and everything under twenty-five percent. That way I know I've a three-in-four chance of being right. If I think it's a pass, I play back a little. If it's a run, I move up to the line."
    "What happens when it's the one time in four you're wrong?" Troy asked.
    "Trouble," Seth said. "But you play the odds when they're that good."
    "But you have to memorize all these situations," Troy said.
    "I know," Seth said. "Look at this."
    He flipped the pages of the notebook, showing Troy dozens of charts and graphs with hundreds of red circles.
    "Some chart run or pass," Seth said, turning the pages. "Some are for which way they run, right or left or up the middle. Some show when they throw deep or short, when they like to run screen passes, or fake the pass and run a draw, or make it look like they're going one way and run it back the other on a reverse."
    "It's a lot," Troy said.
    "That's why what you