Summary: Jay's sports meet/competition~

Note: I chose soccer because that's really the only sport I know how to play and describe best... ^^;; I wasn't the sporty type in high school. And I chose EXO because I this story needs some EXO in it somewhere! XD Enjoy~?

            The sun beat down hard on the field as the crowd gathered into the stands. The group of boys all dressed in matching red and gold jerseys and black shorts huddled beside the silver bleachers.

            “Quit shoving me around, Chan-Yeol!” Baek-Hyun nearly hollered as he shoved the taller male into Jay.

            “Chill! I’m just nervous you little rat!” Chan-Yeol shot a glare at him.

            “About what?” Jay scoffed with a roll of his eyes. “We’re a shoe-in to win!”

            Chan-Yeol shrugged his shoulders, “You sound like you’ve been on this team forever. Jay, you’re a freshman! As a sophomore and the team goalie: you’re in over your head, kid!”

            Jay rolled his eyes at his team-mate. “You’re worrying about nothing! We’re just going to wi--!”

            “WHOO! GO JAY! GO PHOENIXES!”

            The entire team laughed as they turned to see Mr. and Mrs. Nam and little Sunny walking towards them. Jay’s face flushed at the sight of his father’s face painted in the school colors. How embarrassing!

            From the corner of his eye he could spot his best friend Kai, D.O. and Xiu-Min all nudging each other, eyes all locked on his mom. Now that was a disturbing sight. She was his mother for crying out loud! Why did the male students have to find the need to find her attractive?

            “Hey Namstar family!” The team captain and senior, Suho, smiled at them. “I see you’re all prepared for our win.”

            “How could we not? You’re the best team in the region!” Jay’s father grinned and waved around his red and gold triangle flag around in the air.

            The amused group of boys whooped along with him.

            ‘Just let me die now.’ Jay slapped his face into his palm.

            “Would you cool it down on the enthusiasm, Woo-Hyun?” Nina finally swooped in. “As if they weren’t nervous enough!”

            “It’s alright, Mrs. Nam! Actually we’d like it if you did a cheer for us,” Kai slyly asked. “We heard from Jay that you were a dancer back in the day.”

            “No! Absolutely not!” Jay snapped, smacking his friend in the back of the head. “My mom is in a skirt for god’s sake, Kai!”

            Kai sent him a smirk before innocently blinking back at Nina. That’s the point, .

            “Erm… As tempting as that sounds Jong-In, I’d rather do a fist pump every now and then.” She shrugged, patting her daughter’s head. “But maybe Sunny would like to do a cheer for you guys!”

            Sunny looked up at the group of boys shyly with a finger poked in between her lips.

            “Aww!” Chan-Yeol’s voice boomed and a large smile spread across his face. “Your sister is so cute!”

            “Your family seems to have been blessed with looks, Jay!”  Baek-Hyun said as he kneeled down to Sunny’s level. “Although, Sunny looks like the cutest out of the Nam clan.”

            “Do you wanna make a cheer for us, Sunny?” Suho sweetly asked her, gently pinching her cheek.

            She blushed at the intimate contact with the older boy. ‘He’s really handsome…’

            “Quit trying to seduce a six year old girl, Suho!” Chan-Yeol teased. “You’re embarrassing the poor thing!”

            “What? I’m just trying to be a good oppa to her,” He grimaced at his team-mate.

            “Can everyone stop fawning over my sister? We have to warm up!” Jay complained as he took off to take his first lap around the field.

            Soon, the rest of the team joined him in the run, taking the pre-burn in their calves as a blessing.

            Woo-Hyun, Nina, and Sunny found seats towards the center of the bleachers along with Sung-Gyu, Sung-Yeol, and Sung-Jong, their fellow teachers.

            While Sung-Gyu taught calculus, Sung-Yeol found himself teaching Korean history, and Sung-Jong very diligently taught the art classes. All were, of course, very popular with the female students and a few male students. Jay once said it himself that as much as he loved his uncles, he hated that they reported back to his parents every time his grades slipped a bit or he was caught taking peeks under his female classmates’ skirts.

            Sung-Jong played with Sunny’s hair as she chattered to him about her day at school and how many boogers her friend, Zelo, ate and how her other friend, Jong-Up, had attempted to show a dance to the class but was much too shy to perform it in front of everyone and ended up crying.

            “Your daughter seems to have a lot of boy friends, Woo-Hyun,” Sung-Yeol teased and poked the little girl’s cheeks. “You might want to keep an eye on this little bugger!”

            “She can have as many boyfriends as she wants as long as she comes back home to me!” Woo-Hyun smiled, unfazed.

            “You’re saying that now, but how about when she’s in her teens and bringing home her first boyfriend to meet you guys?” Sung-Gyu smirked, seeing the bright smile on Woo-Hyun’s painted face fall.

            Nina rolled her eyes, even as adults these guys still loved getting under each other’s skin like teenagers… Woo-Hyun clutched at Nina’s elbow and swished her from side to side.

            “Oh my god! Nina! What if history repeats and she’s in a relationship like we were?!” Woo-Hyun panicked, his eyes already filling with tears.

            Nina punched Sung-Gyu in the arm and swung her fist at Sung-Yeol’s face. “You guys are always putting stupid ideas in his head! Sunny will be fine! And so what if she happens to be like us? We turned out fine.”

            While the four adults bickered back and forth between each other, Sung-Jong and Sunny just watched in amusement.

            “You have the weirdest parents, Sunny,” Sung-Jong chuckled with a shake of his head.

            “I think you’re the only normal one in the family, Uncle Jongie.” Sunny agreed as she smiled at him.

            The whistle rang loudly throughout the field and the ball was swooped away by Suho. He looked to his left and looked to his right for another red jersey and spotted Jay wide open to the ride of the field. When he had the chance he kicked the ball over to Jay who secured the ball with a head and it landed in front of him.

            “C’mon Jay!” Chan-Yeol hollered from his goalie post. “You’ve got this, kid!”

            Jay’s chest was puffing gently as he dodged his opponents and kept running forward. He looked all around his perimeter for a team-mate and spotted Kai right beside the goal, trying to keep himself open. Jay faked a kick towards Baek-Hyun, effectively fooling two of the opponents, and kicked it straight for Kai once he was fully free of stragglers. Kai bounced the ball off of his chest and danced the ball around, like the show-off that he was, and finally scored the first goal of the evening!

            Being the two closest to him, Baek-Hyun and Jay jumped Kai before they headed back to the starting positions. Jay jumped up and down in place b with excitement; he heard the cheers in the crowd much clearer now and he could hear the hoards of girls screaming his and Kai’s names, he could make out the squeakiness of his sister’s voice making a cheer, and then he could hear his father and, surprisingly, his mother screaming words of encouragement to him. He was feeling really good.

            A whole quarter went by with the score teetering on either team’s lead. First it was Magnolia High’s (their) lead, then it was Seong High School’s (the opponents), then Magnolia’s… Needless to say, when the score was tied, the team’s coach, Choi Min-Ho, wasn’t too happy about the way the quarter ended. The boys would flinch every time Coach Choi would point out one of their flaws in the game. They were used to the yelling, Coach Choi was the biggest soccer star in his high school career (Woo-Hyun, Nina, Sung-Jong, Sung-Yeol, and Sung-Gyu could all remember just how fired up the man could get in a match…) and he expected no less from his team, but the fact that they were completely tied with Seong High’s team and they couldn’t make heads or tails of who would win was already bearing down on them hard.

            “Maybe if Chan-Yeol could just focus instead of waving at the girls…!” D.O. shot an uncharacteristic glare at the tall boy.

            “Oh yeah? Well what good are your big eyes for if you can’t see the ing ball going straight for you! You could have saved that goal at the 20 minute mark, Kyung-Soo!” Chan-Yeol growled at him.

            “Let’s not forget Xiu-Min wouldn’t run to help either of you two out!” Kai prodded a tan finger into Xiu-Min’s chest.

            “Oh!” Xiu-Min scoffed and shoved Kai back. “And you think you’re so hot? How about that goal you failed to make five minutes ago?! Way to up our chances for a lead, Jong-In!”

            “Guys! Calm down!” Suho finally stepped in, voice firm and clearly unpleased with how his team was behaving. “We’re all trying to do the best we can. If the other team is tied with us then we should be pretty damn happy about it.”

            “What should we be so happy about, Suho?” Jay grimaced, staring up at the scoreboard the read: 7-7. “There’s a possibility that we’re going to lose.”

            “So what? Silver’s pretty damn good for me!” Suho grinned. “If the other team is tieing with us it means that they’re just the opponents we’re looking for. This match’s exciting because we don’t know what’s going to happen. Isn’t this the match we’ve been waiting for all season? Not the matches where all we did was just stand around while we made goal after goal after goal? C’mon! Isn’t the adrenaline pumping through your veins while the anticipation is eating you up?”

The boys all nodded, taking in the hydration of their team leader’s words. He was right. What good was taking it easy if it felt unfulfilling? This match was actually one of the most exciting matches they’d had all season!

            “Let’s just give it our all and lay everything we’ve got on that field,” Suho huffed, putting his arms around Jay and Chan-Yeol’s shoulders.

            Then they held onto one more member and the chain followed until they were all huddled in a tight circle. They patted each other’s backs three times before each putting one fist into the center, all on top of each other’s, and brought them up while yelling: Magnolia fighting!

            The teams all assembled to their places, the goals switching around as per the protocol, and the match began with another sharp blow of the whistle.

            And the game continued with the same teetering format. Magnolia, Seong, Magnolia, Seong, Magnolia, Seong. Cheers and groans could be heard echoing throughout the field every other minute. The boys would be running up and down the field in a huffing, puffing, sweat-drenched mess, each shouting words of encouragement or telling someone to take to a different part of the field.

            “On your left!”

            “Right, right, right!”

            “Back behind you!”

            “Get on him! Get on him!”

            Jay felt like he was going to collapse any moment now with the incredible sense of exhaustion looming over his head. Soon the final tick on the clock was in the air and he was the one stuck with the ball.

            Everyone’s eyes were on him, silently pressuring him to make the goal to shift the win to their side. He knew that even though Suho insisted that silver was something that he would have been proud of, a gold would have made him even happier.

            ‘Christ! Just keep pushing on, Jay!’ he urged himself, spinning this way and that when the other team’s players flocked towards him.

            The ball was still under his control when he finally decided to take the small window of opportunity to kick the ball towards the net.

            His ears muffled the sounds of cheering, boos and groans, making him feel as if he had been submerged in water. Soon enough he felt the impact of a shove and he found himself with his back against the ground and Kai on top of him pounding against his chest. He could make out the shapes of his other teammates and Coach Min-Ho before another person hopped on him and then another and another.

            “We got the gold!!!”

            “You did it, kid!”

            “I could kiss you right now, but I’d rather kiss your mom instead!”

            “Kai!”

            “We’re the regional champs!!!”

            That night Jay slept with the praises of his team, his uncles, and family ringing in his ears and his gold soccer medal wrapped loosely around his neck. The proud smile on his face never left.