It is wise to know the course thoroughly before running it. If possible, go over it in an automobile or walk it the day before the race, studying it … - Harold Keith

That night Lee lay awake, staring into the darkness and wrestling with his problem. Jean was asleep beside him, her breathing slow and regular. Why do I coach? he asked himself. Why don't I get into something else?
He turned on his side, smoothed his pillow, and thought about it. He liked boys. He and Jean had even wanted to adopt a boy, but so far they hadn't been successful. Also, he was fond of basketball. Every time he saw a basketball game he wanted to get into it. With him, coaching ranked next to playing. Like an architect or a composer, a coach created an exciting something that the whole community could embrace. It was fun to get wrapped up in a team and all the boys in it, and to watch them develop and mature.
Lee sighed and flipped over on his back. Coaching was like narcotics; once you started, it hooked you. He remembered his friend Jim Fessenden. Jim had a degree in mathematics from Princeton. He had also played tackle on the football team there. On the day they handed him his diploma an insurance firm offered him ten thousand dollars a year to start as a junior actuary. But the position wasn't exciting enough. Jim turned it down to take a job at six thousand coaching a high school football team in Kansas.
But this wasn't Kansas. It wasn't even coaching boys. This was a new town and a new job. He hated to be pushed around, by that surly school board president or anyone else. If he was ever going to get his team back, now was the time. He had to act fast. Enrollment started at nine.

And he had to face something else, too, his own paralyzing fear of being hit in the scrimmages. The whole squad had seen it. There was no way a boy could hide cowardice in football.

The town had been named for Abner Ernest Norman, a Kentuckian. Norman, a government engineer, in 1871 had headed a surveying party north from Red river. They always camped, when they could, near a spring that bubbled up invitingly from a shady spot about a quarter of a mile south of where the city water tower now stands at the intersection of the railroad and Lindsey street. This spot became known as Camp Norman but was later called Bishop's Springs, after a settler who homesteaded it. The surveyors carved the name Camp Norman on several large cottonwood trees growing near by, so they could locate the pleasant spot during future visits. After the railroad came through sixteen years later, a box car was set out near the Santa Fe section house now stands and the words "Norman Switch" were painted on the car. The name stuck.