Chapter 103: You Get Used to Throwing Up

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Nolan looked over the room.

No one stood.

“Good,” he said. “Nobody wants to run away. That means you still have a little shame left.”

At the back of the room, Rice slowly raised his hand.

Nolan stared at him.

“If this is long-term strength training,” Rice said, “what happens to classes?”

Nolan almost laughed. Rice had never looked this passionate about school before.

Closed training required focus. Morning classes, homework, practice, meals, recovery, sleep, and film could not all fit into the same normal day. Something had to give.

“Coach Thomas and I will talk to the school,” Nolan said. “The camp will be school-sanctioned. You will still have assignments and study time, but for the training block, football comes first.”

That made a few players nervous. Seniors had lighter schedules and college visits coming, so most starters cared less. Younger players traded looks.

Nolan let them whisper for a moment.

“You can choose,” he said. “But tell me why you play. To win one game? To win a national title? To become a college player? A pro? To become the kind of man who does not break when someone bigger hits him?”

He struck his own chest.

“This is not just a camp. This is a chance to change your life. Who wants to waste it?”

No one moved after that.

“Good. We will announce the exact schedule this afternoon.”

He said it with authority because he had no idea what the exact schedule was.

That part belonged to someone qualified.

…

After the meeting, Nolan, Thomas, and the strength coach locked themselves in a smaller room.

The strength coach built the real program.

“Linemen need drive first,” he said. “Then grip, pulling strength, explosiveness, stability. Chest, shoulders, delts, triceps, back, traps, biceps, legs, core, lower back, abdomen. Everything supports contact.”

The list of drills grew quickly: bench press, overhead press, dumbbell curls, bent-over flys, rows, box jumps, sled pushes, Russian twists, kettlebell swings, Turkish get-ups, tire drags, handstand push-ups, medicine-ball throws, backward jumps.

Nolan listened, then tripled the volume.

The strength coach stared at him. “They will get hurt.”

“Then scale the execution, not the goal,” Nolan said. “If they want to chase my level, they need a level of will they have never used before.”

Nutrition came next: three meals, three snacks, enough protein, enough carbohydrates, enough water, and enough sleep to keep bodies from falling apart.

The school would provide classrooms for sleeping space, supervised study periods, and lights-out rules. Wake early, train early, eat often, recover when told.

Thomas lowered his voice after that.

“I can talk to a pharmacist. There are gray-area protocols. No mystery vials, no locker-room garbage, but enough support to make the training stick.”

Nolan looked at him. “Side effects?”

Thomas gave a grim smile. “Everything has side effects. Water has side effects if you are stupid enough with it.”

“Then no one takes anything blind. Medical checks, no unlabeled vials, no dosing advice from idiots.”

“Agreed.”

Thomas was not naive. Neither was Nolan. Other opponents were already playing with medical exemptions, inhalers, supplements, and worse. BHHS could not pretend purity was protection.

But Nolan also had no interest in killing a teammate for a high school trophy.

…

The harder problem was money.

Housing could be handled with classrooms and school facilities, but food alone would cost a small fortune. Add equipment, trainers, transportation, cleaning, and incidentals, and the number became ugly.

Thomas smiled the way cowards smiled when delegating danger.

“You and Grace get along.”

“No.”

“You do.”

“No.”

“I will handle the leave paperwork. You handle the budget.”

Grace rejected the number before Nolan finished saying it.

“Thirty thousand dollars? Absolutely not.”

“That already removes lodging,” Nolan said. “I still need three classrooms approved.”

“The athletics budget is bleeding. We are barely halfway into the semester, and I have spent almost half of it.”

“How much did you let the travel company take from you?”

Grace’s face darkened.

Nolan changed tactics.

“Then we sell the camp.”

“Sell it?”

“Make it a documentary. A training-camp series. The station gets behind-the-scenes access. We use the rights fee to cover costs.”

American sports already understood the value of turning training into content. Fight promotions had used it. Football teams used it. A high school team with a freak quarterback and a national-bowl chase had a story people would watch.

Grace frowned. “I do not know anyone at a television station.”

…

The next day, Nolan brought the Prime Ticket program director, a producer, and Penny Webb into Grace’s office.

Grace stared at the business card for a long time.

Nolan had solved the problem in one day.

After a surprisingly friendly negotiation, the station agreed to pay $50,000 for behind-the-scenes rights to the closed training camp and produce a six-episode documentary tentatively titled Thirty Days with the Normans.

The school would not pay for the camp.

It would earn $20,000 on top.

Grace’s smile stayed fixed long after the visitors left.

“You are useful,” she said.

“I prefer brilliant.”

“Useful is what gets budgets approved.”

Nolan had already arranged suppliers. Food would come through the supermarket where Mia worked. Mason, the hot-dog vendor, was delighted to take a temporary kitchen role for steady pay.

Grace still refused to give him a blank check.

“Every expense goes through me.”

“Of course.”

“Unless you want to help me with something.”

Nolan waited.

“The cheer squad has barely trained this week. I am drowning. I do not need you to teach dance. I need you to keep them moving and make sure the organization does not collapse.”

“No.”

“No?”

“You pay extra.”

Grace closed her eyes. “Of course you said that.”

…

That night, nearly sixty football players arrived on campus with bags.

Nolan stood in front of them with his hands behind his back, looking far too much like Thomas for his own comfort.

“Starting tonight, you live together, eat together, train together. Lights out before ten. Wake-up at five-thirty. Morning work starts at six. This continues until three days before the Bishop Gorman game.”

“What about you?” Cooper asked.

“Same as you.”

The players cheered.

Nolan intended to stay only a few nights, then hand night supervision to Thomas or another coach. But morale mattered.

“Rules. During camp, Friday league games are handled, but everything else gets blocked. No outside distractions. No entertainment. I am collecting anything that wastes time, and you get it back at the end.”

He kicked a plastic bin forward.

The bags opened one by one.

Men’s magazines, Playboy, Penthouse, Walkmans, Game Boys, cell phones, camcorders, and several deeply suspicious tissue supplies went into the bin.

Then Nolan dragged their unadjusted body clocks to the track for fifteen laps.

They returned quieter.

At dawn, Hollywood Hills gained a new line of suffering teenagers. Each player wore a sandbag belt and ran along the rough dirt path, the group stretched over several dozen yards.

Nolan rode beside them on a four-wheeled ATV from Thomas’s garage and called cadence in a cleaned-up rhythm he had borrowed from Full Metal Jacket.

Rice had the neatest gear in the entire camp: knee sleeves, elbow sleeves, wrist wraps, headband, and running shoes that flashed with each heavy step.

Bad students always owned the most stationery.

He also fell behind first.

Nolan took out a small prop whip from a San Gabriel shop and cracked it in the air behind him. It never touched Rice, but the sound did the job.

Rice yelped and accelerated with tears in his eyes.

By the time they reached a flat patch in the hills, several players staggered aside and vomited.

Rice bent over with both hands on his knees.

“I cannot do this. That was the third time.”

Nolan smiled and flicked the little whip once.

“Do not worry. You get used to throwing up.”

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