Sixteen Girls, One Cooler Box, and a Weekend in Mbombela I Did Not Ask For

How a man with no hockey knowledge ends up holding a whistle

I am fifty two years old. I played rugby at a school in Boksburg in the eighties, and I played it badly, mostly on the wing where I could stand in the sun and look interested. I have never held a hockey stick with confidence in my life. I could not tell you, honestly, what a long corner is without checking on my phone first, and I have checked on my phone many times, and it has not stuck.

And yet here I am, coach of the under thirteen girls' team, because in March there was a meeting in the clubhouse in Benoni and a woman asked, three times, if anybody would take the side, and the silence got so long and so embarrassing that I heard my own voice say "I'll do it" the way you hear someone else's car alarm. My daughter Kea plays. That is my entire qualification. Kea is thirteen and plays left of centre and is very good in a way I do not have the vocabulary to describe, so I say things like "you were nice out there" and she looks at me with the patience of a woman dealing with a slow dog.

The team took it well. Thirteen year old girls are more generous than adults. They worked out inside two practices that I did not know what I was doing, and instead of mutiny they simply started coaching themselves and letting me blow the whistle at intervals. Amahle, who plays centre, would say "Coach, should we do the thing where we push it wide?" and I would say "Yes. Do the thing," and she would nod and organise everybody, and I would feel like a man being helped across a road.

The tournament, and the thing I did not read properly

Then came the Mpumalanga tournament in July. Four teams, two days, Nelspruit, or Mbombela, depending which sign you read on the way in. I said yes to that too, obviously, because saying yes had become my whole personality by then.

Lindiwe is the team manager. Lindiwe has a clipboard. I do not mean she carries a clipboard occasionally. I mean she has one, the way some people have a dog. On it are laminated pages and a plastic sleeve of consent forms and a column headed "Meals" which I did not look at closely enough in the beginning, and that is where all my trouble came from.

She said, in the WhatsApp group, that catering for the Saturday would be handled by the coach. And I read that message on my phone while walking to my car and I thought, casually, the way a fool thinks: fine. Sandwiches. How hard.

Sixteen girls. I had it written down in front of me and it still did not register as a number. Sixteen is an abstraction until it is standing in front of you in blue and white asking what there is to eat.

Friday night, and a bakkie full of ice

We drove up on the Friday afternoon, a convoy of parents down the N4, past the tollgate at Machadodorp where the temperature climbs and the air changes and your ears do that thing. I had my brother's cooler box in the back, the big white one with the broken handle, because at some point in my planning I had decided the cooler box was the solution. I had filled it with ice and juice and about forty bottles of water and it weighed more than my first car.

The girls sang in the minibus for two hours. Not one song all the way through. Just the loud parts of songs, on repeat, in the wrong key, and Kea sat in the middle of that with her head thrown back laughing, and every time I looked in the mirror she stopped, because I was looking.

Saturday, and the arithmetic of teenagers

The first game was at eight. It was already warm at seven. By ten it was the kind of Lowveld heat where you can feel your own pulse in your face.

Nomonde is our keeper. She is small and quiet and she puts on all that padding and becomes a different creature entirely, but before every single match she goes behind the pavilion and is sick. She is not sick because she is unwell. She is sick because she cares more than her body can hold. Nobody had told me this, because everyone else already knew. On the Saturday morning I found her back there, hands on her knees, and I did the only thing I could think of, which was to hand her a water bottle and stand facing away so she had her privacy, and say nothing at all, and then when she straightened up I said "You good?" and she said "I'm good, Coach," and jogged off. That was our whole relationship for the weekend and it worked perfectly.

At half past ten I understood what I had done.

Sixteen girls, having run in that heat, in that sun, wanting food. I had made sandwiches at four that morning. I had made, I thought, an enormous amount of sandwiches. I had stood in my kitchen in the dark buttering bread until my wrist hurt and thinking, this is far too much bread, this is comical.

It lasted nine minutes.

I am not exaggerating for effect. I watched a pyramid of food that had taken me two hours to build disappear in the time it takes to boil a kettle twice, and Sinead, who is our smallest player and weighs about as much as my cooler box, ate four and then asked, without any malice, what else there was.

And then Lindiwe arrived at my shoulder with the clipboard and said, flatly, "Did you do Thandi's separately?" and I said, "Thandi's what?" and Lindiwe closed her eyes for slightly too long. Thandi is a vegetarian. Has been since she was nine. It is written on the form, in the column, in Lindiwe's handwriting. And Rebecca cannot eat nuts, not a little, not "she'll be fine," properly cannot, and I had made a chicken mayo that I had improved with, God help me, a handful of crushed peanuts, because I had seen it somewhere.

Nobody ate that one. Lindiwe made sure of it. She did not shout at me. It would have been kinder if she had.

Where the takeaways came in

So at eleven o'clock on a Saturday in Mbombela, sunburnt, holding a clipboard I had been handed like a summons, I stood in the shade of a jacaranda and started phoning around for takeaways that could handle sixteen people at short notice, one vegetarian, one nut allergy, and a delivery to a school field whose actual address I did not know.

I want to be honest about how badly I did this. I phoned four places. I spelled the name of the school wrong twice. A woman in Sonheuwel had to explain to me, patiently, that a platter is counted in halves, not in girls, which is a distinction I had never in fifty two years needed to make. I stood there doing sums on the back of a fixtures sheet like a man defusing something.

Kea walked past while I was on the phone saying "no, no nuts, I need you to actually check," and she stopped and stared at me and said "Dad. Please." Just that. The full weight of thirteen. I was, in that moment, the most humiliating object in the province.

What arrived, eventually, at about one, was enough food, which was all I had asked of the universe. Boxes on the grass in the shade. The vegetarian ones marked in koki. Rebecca's kept separate on a chair like a small hostage. And Lindiwe walked past, looked at it, ticked something on her clipboard, and said "Fine," and I felt something close to joy.

I ate a slice of tomato at four in the afternoon. That was my Saturday.

The results, briefly, because they do not matter

We lost, drew, lost, and then beat a side from White River on the Sunday morning by a goal that Amahle scored and that I did not see because I was at that moment refilling water bottles out of the cooler box with my back to the field. I heard it. I heard sixteen girls make a noise, and I turned around too late, and Kea was already in the pile of them somewhere.

The N4, on the way home

Sunday afternoon on the way back, Kea sat in front with me. The others went with the Mahlangus. She had her feet on my dashboard, which is not allowed, and I let it go.

Somewhere before Belfast she said, not looking at me, "Nomonde told me you didn't make a big thing of it. The throwing up." And I said no, I didn't. And she said, "That's why she likes you."

Then she put her feet down and found a song and turned it up too loud and we drove.

I have already told Lindiwe that next July I am ordering the platters on the Wednesday before, like a person with a functioning brain, and she wrote it on the clipboard without looking up, which I have decided to read as forgiveness.

I am still no good at hockey. I still cannot explain a long corner. I have watched three videos. But I know now that Nomonde needs to be left alone for four minutes and then asked one short question, and that Thandi does not want to be a fuss, and that sixteen is a bigger number than it looks, and that I will do it again next season, because nobody else will, and because of a sentence my daughter said with her feet on my dashboard while I was busy looking at the road.