Teammates

First there was daylight-then there wasn’t. The hole in the line opened and closed that quickly. Smack! Tiki saw the football fly into the air at the same moment he felt his feet go out from under him.
“Fumble!”
“Get it!”

Tiki lay on his side, helplessly watching the squirming mass of arms and legs five yards away. The referee was poking under and peeling off the bodies. Ronde was the next-to-last player at the bottom of the pile. Maybe? But no.
The Vikings had lost the ball on a fumble–for the third time.
Yes, it was only a preseason practice game. Still, it was against the Vikings’ arch-rivals, the Knights.
Tiki, head bent, shuffled off the field, wishing he could just plain disappear. He stared down at his two hands. What gives? I’ve always carried the ball this way before.

After the game the twins were waiting for their mother to pick them up. Along with with Coach Mike, they walked toward the practice field gate. They sat on a bench by the fence.
Ronde tried to cheer his brother up. “It’s okay, Tiki. Mistakes happen.” Coach Mike interrupted. “Mistakes do happen. But you can make them happen less often if you…” The coach paused, searching for the right words. “Practice!” Tiki jumped in.

The coach smiled. “Have you heard the old saying: ‘Practice makes perfect”?”
The twins smiled back and nodded. Who hadn’t heard that one?
“Well, it’s not exactly true.”
Was this some kind of joke?
“If you’re not practicing the right way, you’re just practicing your bad habits.”
“Huh?”

Coach Mike held the football in front of him with one hand. “If you practice carrying a football like this, you’ll never really get good because it is the wrong way to carry the ball.”
Then Coach Mike went on. “See: four contact points. One: your fingers around the tip. Two: the other tip in your armpit. Three: one side of the ball against your forearm. Four: the other side against your chest. Try knocking it out,” he said.
Tiki and Ronde took turns trying-but no luck. “One, two, three, four contact points,” the coach repeated. “You do it.” He handed the football to Tiki.

A car horn sounded. The twins waved and scrambled toward their mother’s car, with Tiki carrying the football firmly tucked in his arm.
“Hi, Mike!”
“Hi, Mrs. Barber. We were just talking about the right way to carry a football.”
Mrs. Barber laughed. “Good. Because we have to carry some boxes of dishes tonight from the pantry to a closet. And I don’t want anything dropped!”