After a half hour of drills, Coach Clayton divided up the twenty-five basketball hopefuls into five teams for full-court scrimmages. The scrimmage rules were simple. Five minutes on the clock. Only those defensive actions that drew blood or left a bruise were considered fouls. When the five minutes were up, the winning team stayed on the court. The losers sat. Coach placed Cody on a team with Alston, Pork Chop, Bart Evans, and a sharp-boned point guard named Bradley Lang. Cody’s team took the court first and won six games in a row. Alston was shooting lights-out, Pork Chop was a beast under the boards, and Cody clamped on each opposing small forward like a bear trap. Brett Evans hit two fall-away jumpers over him in the first game. No one scored on him after that. Cody even got a congratulatory chest bump from Alston when he blocked a Matt Slaven baseline jumper, smacking it off the exit sign at the gym’s north end. “Looks like we have a juggernaut here,” Coach Clayton observed after Pork Chop tipped in a missed shot to seal victory number six.
