All Lined Up

Behind the Book

I grew up in a small Texas town as a coach’s daughter. It’s hard to put into words the role that football and sports played in my childhood. All I can say is that my memories of Friday nights are more vivid than anything else. When I think about my childhood, I remember the smell of the field, the bright lights, the concession stands, and the plague of crickets. Football wasn’t just a sport . . . it was a social setting, a way of life. I remember tumbling down the bleachers when I was little and hanging out beneath them when I got old enough to run around on my own. I remember being devastated when I didn’t snag one of the plastic footballs that the cheerleaders threw. I remember the tailgate parties, the away games, and the way a win or a loss could uplift or tear down an entire town.

Then, as I got older, I remember when football became more connected to boys. In middle school, going to the game was about as close as you could get to a “date.” I also distinctly remember my first middle school dance and how, out of nowhere, older boys I’d never met were asking me to dance. It didn’t take long to figure out they were sucking up to the coach’s daughter. On the flip side, the boys my age were still petrified of my father. Then there was the time my dad made a rule in practice that my current boyfriend had to do push-ups every time the whistle blew (thanks, Dad).

Texas football is a unique world in and of itself, but being the coach’s daughter became part of who I was, as inseparable from my identity as my freckled skin and super loud voice. Sometimes I loved football and a lot of times I hated it, but it’s the only childhood I know. So when I tell stories (as I so often do), an inordinate number of them are about my life growing up in Texas. It was one such story that led to the creation of this book. At a conference in New York, I was chatting with my editor, agent, and a few other authors and bloggers, and we got to talking about how Texas in many ways feels like a foreign country. There are things that are completely normal in Texas that the rest of the world finds absolutely bizarre. This particular story was about Texas homecoming mums, the massive fake flower and ribbon monstrosities that are a rite of passage for any Texas girl. If you don’t know what they are, google them. It will baffle you. It wasn’t until a few months later that my editor brought up the idea of writing a series about the Texas football life that I knew so well.

I told her, absolutely! I can definitely do that. After all, who better to write a story about a coach’s daughter than someone who’d lived it? Never could I have anticipated how simultaneously difficult and easy this book would be to write. It was easy because as they say, you should write what you know. But writing what I knew also required me to delve back into those years as the coach’s daughter, which don’t feel like that long ago. The relationship between Dallas and her dad is scarily similar to the one I had with my own father. We’re both insanely stubborn and too much alike, and when I decided I wanted to do theater, it caused a rift in our relationship that exploded into arguments at every turn. Unlike Dallas, I did manage to cut myself off from football as soon as I graduated high school. And as soon as I could, I left Texas for the Northeast, desperate to get away from that small-town Texas life that had driven me crazy even as it shaped me into the person I am.

Writing those scenes with Dallas and the coach required me to take a long, honest look at my past. All the while, my dad was graciously answering questions about different positions and types of defense and offense and practice drills. I think we talked more about football within a few weeks than we talked about it the entire rest of my life combined. In fact, it was the most we’d talked about anything period in a long time. Writing Dallas’s story was a bit like a do-over for me. Whereas I held onto my bitterness and resentment for many years, I got to free Dallas of it. And in doing so I freed myself, too. This book taught me to love Texas again in a way that I’d forgotten, and it helped me understand a father that I spent too long pushing away.

So, this is my tribute to Texas and to coaches’ daughters and to the coaches themselves. It wasn’t the simplest life, but I also wouldn’t trade it for anything.