I saw that Marcena was recording them, using a neat little red device, about the size and shape of a fountain pen. I’d admired it the first time I saw it-it was a digital gizmo, of course, and could hold eight hours of talk in its tiny head. And unless Marcena told people, they didn’t know they were being recorded. She hadn’t told the girls she was taping them, but I decided not to make an issue of it-chances were, they’d be flattered, not offended.

I let it go on for fifteen minutes, then brought over the board and began drawing play routes on it. Marcena was a good sport-when she saw the team would rather talk to her than listen to me she put her recorder away and said she’d finish after practice.

I sent two squads to the floor for an actual scrimmage. Marcena watched for a few minutes, then climbed up the rickety bleachers to my center’s boyfriend. He sat up straighter and at one point actually seemed to speak with real animation. This distracted Sancia so much that she muffed a routine pass and let the second team get an easy score.

“Head in the game, Sancia,” I barked in my best Coach McFarlane imitation, but I was still relieved when the reporter climbed down from the bleachers and ambled out of the gym: everyone got more focused on what was happening on the court.

Last night at dinner, when Marcena proposed coming with me this afternoon, I’d tried to talk her out of it. South Chicago is a long way from anywhere, and I warned her I couldn’t take a break to drive her downtown if she got bored.

Love had laughed. “I have a high boredom threshold. You know the series I’m doing for the Guardian on the America that Europeans don’t see? I have to start somewhere, and who could be more invisible than the girls you’re coaching? By your account, they’re never going to be Olympic stars or Nobel Prize winners, they come from rough neighborhoods, they have babies-”

“In other words, just like the girls in South London,” Morrell had interrupted. “I don’t think you’ve got a world-beating story there, Love.”