“Why did you make me do that?” she demanded.

            “Don’t worry, kiddo,” John said in that confident “I can fix this” tone of his. “We’ll work on it as soon as we get home.”

            “I’d rather just paint,” Bay informed him. (She’d picked up her first brush the year before, when she was five, and had fallen in love with the activity of painting.)

            But there would be no painting that day. There would be dribbling drills and stop-and-kick drills and a crash course in the proper running technique. I stood there watching her struggle—and watching him struggle to teach her how not to struggle—for what seemed like forever.

            By dinnertime, Bay had had it.

            And John knew it.