A spring tide is when the Moon is either new or full, and the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth are perfectly aligned. When this happens, their collective gravitational pull on all the bodies of water on Earth is strengthened.

At Clemson University, the football spring game this year had a similar sentiment. Although, that wasn't normally the vibe of the yearly spring game, despite the fact that it regularly would sell out all 40,000 tickets that the school made available for it. That part wasn't abnormal, it was just college football in the South.

But this year, the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth were perfectly aligned, because to Clemson, Reid Donahue was the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth all at once, and the gravitational pull his return to football had on this entire campus was simply otherworldly.

The spring game itself was rarely important to anyone outside of the football program, since it was just an intersquad and allowed the offense and the defense to practice the closest thing they could to in-game scenarios before the season started in the fall. It gave all of us in the sports media department a chance to practice what we would do in-game, too. I'd made new Instagram graphics for the season and was still testing out the Nikon I'd treated myself to for Christmas.

But when Reid took the field for the first time in almost two years, it felt like I'd been thrust right into a jet engine, surrounded by blaring sound and hot air. When he completed his first pass - nothing more than a simple checkdown to our star running back Drake Brooks - we may as well have broken the sound barrier. People didn't cheer that loud at some regular season home games.

"It's titanium," Kayla told me at the beginning of the game. "Specially designed just for him."

She gestured to the large brace Reid wore on his right leg, glinting brightly in the sunlight as if it were a crown bestowed upon him and his divine right to rule and not medical equipment intended to keep the structure of his knee intact.

I didn't know the gory details of Reid's injury since I hadn't been in attendance for the game he got hurt back during our sophomore year, and it had become kind of weird to talk about on campus, in the way that it feels weird to talk about a god as if he were a regular person.

I could have looked it up, but the very thought of someone's leg getting snapped in half made me squeamish.

All I knew was that after the injury, Reid had become a mystery seemingly overnight. Nothing more than a shadow you could catch (if you were lucky) darting in between the street lights on campus going to his night classes. Within a year, the mystery became a legend, and the legend became a myth. There were whispers in the corners of the football facilities that he'd never play again, but that was just a rumor. Some people even said they saw his foot facing in the wrong direction when he got hurt. That was an even worse rumor.

When word had come out last month that Reid was returning to football, the rumor mill caught fire and exploded. Suddenly the man, the myth, the legend had been deified again. If I'd learned anything from worlds like Game of Thrones, you couldn't take away someone's divine right to rule that easily.

"Touchdown, Reid Donahue!"

The band kicked up into the standard touchdown tune, the sound lifting my gaze back to the field. As I found the far end zone, I saw Reid - infamously dubbed "The Archer" for his bow and arrow firing touchdown celebration - doing exactly that. Back to normal, as if nothing had changed. The echoing of the crowd as it spilled down onto the field made my ears ring.

They took Reid out of the game after that second score, 1 - to not overexert himself in his first snaps back and 2 - to test out the other pieces of the offense, as was the normal protocol for the spring game. Reid returned to the bench to jostling and jubilation from both the team and the crowd. I should have been accustomed to all the yelling and cheering by now, but it was starting to give me a headache.

After all the obligatory high-fives and congrats, Reid slumped into a secluded place on the bench, directly in front of one of the big industrial fans they kept on the sidelines to keep the players cooled off. Our newly hired offensive coordinator, Coach Nix, brought his head down to Reid's to whisper something in his ear, and he scowled. Lip reading was a skill I'd been forced to acquire after spending long hours in loud places where even your thoughts were drowned out, but my focus was broken.

"What do you think of this?" Kayla asked as she dropped her iPad into my unprepared hands, and I nearly dropped it. She'd put together a quick video edit of Reid's first score, and slowed it down during his bow and arrow celebration, and when the video faded to black, our paw print logo faded in with two words written underneath: The Archer Returns.

"You're a Final Cut sorceress," I slid her a smirk as I handed the iPad back to her.

I could only hope I was half as good as she was at editing and creating content next year. One of the most important things about running media for a high entertainment, high visibility sport like college football was turnaround. Big play? Someone scores? Pick six? Better have that graphic ready no more than two minutes after it happens. I loved football, but the lightspeed demand made it hard to actually watch and enjoy the games.

I felt a little river of sweat drip down the back of my t-shirt as I trailed Kayla down the sideline after the game, and I regretted wearing white. It shouldn't have been this hot in May, but as the high noon sun crawled across the sky above us, there wasn't a cloud in sight, and being on the turf was always 10 degrees hotter.

A whole manner of professional media personnel descended upon the big orange paw print logo at the center of the field, no doubt looking for sound clips from Reid and/or Head Coach Riley. We'd get our turn eventually, but since we weren't multi-million dollar media outlets like ESPN and the ACC Network - just a few girls with cameras in Clemson t-shirts and jeans - we'd have to wait.

Reid stuck out in the center of the circle, mostly because he had almost a foot of height on everyone else around him. Licks of his chocolate brown hair were matted to his forehead with sweat, and his cheeks were still pink from the sun and the heat. He'd grown in a bit of scruff over the spring, detracting from the baby face that never really seemed to go with the 6'5", 230 pound body it belonged to. He'd already taken his shoulder pads off, and his sweat-drenched compression shirt was so tight it looked like it had been painted onto his torso, highlighting every dip and ridge from his chest down to his abs.

I might have thought he was an asshole, but I wasn't immune to how attractive he was. Hard to believe anybody could be. But somehow when it came to Reid, effortless good looks made him all the more frustrating to be around.

I sucked in a breath and snapped a few photos just for contingency. One of the first things I learned from Kayla was that you could never have too much content - it's always better than having too little. I quickly glanced down at my shots, and even on the preview screen, Reid's forced, tight-lipped smile was all too apparent, and there was a vacant, disinterested look glazed over his eyes.

"He looks good, doesn't he?" Kayla mentioned offhandedly. He of course being Reid, because nobody else mattered. She kept her head tilted downward towards her iPad, as if it pinged with a notification every time I had Reid Donahue thoughts.

I offered her a humorless chuckle. "Do you mean in an NFL scouting way or in an ogling sorority girl way?"

Kayla shrugged. "Both?"

I quickly closed out my photo previews and pretended to fiddle with the settings on my Nikon. "Decline to comment."

Kayla snickered. "You're the only person on campus I know who actively dislikes Reid Donahue."

"It's not that I don't like him, I just think..." I paused and pinched my lips together. "I think he reminds me of the archetypical asshole jock in every early 2000s coming of age movie. All he needs is a varsity jacket that he inexplicably wears every day."

"Oddly specific," Kayla rolled her eyes at me.

"Oh and remember that time after the USC game he had someone bring in a whole roast chicken so he could rip its legs off in front of their home crowd?" I made a sour face at the thought. "I think he just likes being a spectacle. It's too Baker Mayfield leaning for me, personally."

"Okay, you have to admit the chicken thing was funny," Kayla held up her hands in defense.

"Except a gamecock isn't a chicken, it's a rooster," I replied intently, referencing the University of South Carolina's unfortunate mascot. "But I guess irony is not lost on guys like Reid freakin' Donahue."

I'd gotten to know a lot of the guys on the football team this past year, and most of them were fine given I had to spend almost every day with them in some capacity. But I'd been exposed to Reid enough, like in the way that you can be exposed to radiation. He was in my media immersion class freshman year and rarely showed up - and when he did, he half-assed everything, because he already knew he could. The tenacity and sideshow bullshit worked for SportsCenter highlight reels and the general public hype, but you could be a great football player without being a circus act on the side. I just wondered if Reid knew that.

Kayla entertained another faint smirk and shook her head. "He's not like that anymore."

"I'll believe that when I see it," I grumbled, more to myself than her.

"You're about to."

When Reid moved, bodies parted like the Red Sea for him, and he made his way over to us, lingering on the edge of the 50 yard line. I wasn't short by any means, but he made me feel small in more than a few ways as he got closer. My gaze was pulled to the brace on his leg, and maybe I was just imagining it, but he walked with the faintest limp.

"So, how do you feel?" Kayla wasted no time with niceties. Another thing she taught me - form relationships early so you don't need the niceties. "Back to normal?"

"I feel fucking hot," Reid answered as he walked by us without stopping.

"Come on Donahue, you know you can't curse," Kayla called after him. "Now I can't use that sound bite!"

He spun on the heel of his cleats to offer her a shrug before turning back around and walking towards the tunnel to the locker rooms.

"Oh yeah, he's changed a lot," I poked Kayla's shoulder. "He's even more of an ass now."

Kayla blew out a breath. "It's like I can't even get a full sentence out of him nowadays." She paused and turned her whole body to face me, and the corners of her mouth lifted into another smirk. "Maybe you'll have more luck next year."

I scoffed. "I doubt it."

Kayla's smirk widened. "Speaking of, I have a surprise for you."

"Oh no," I shook my head as I slid my camera into my shoulder bag. "I hate surprises."

"No no, you're gonna love this one, I promise."

Kayla took my arm and led me eagerly across the football field. The stadium had emptied significantly since the game ended (aside from a few players and staff), and the sudden silence hit me like a pile of bricks. I took one last glance up into the stands, where in the stone ledge that divided the lower deck and the upper deck it read Clemson University Welcomes You to Death Valley. Under the merciless sun, it sure felt like Death Valley.

We took a golf cart back to the football operations complex - a swanky, multimillion dollar facility complete with indoor and outdoor practice fields, floor-to-ceiling windows, cold therapy tubs, a nine-hole mini golf course, the biggest weight room on any college campus, and a god damn swirly slide to get from the second floor to the first floor if you were too cool to take the stairs. But most importantly, content and media had our own little hallway and offices.

I'd only started covering football last year. I was a Sports Media major, but seniority mattered here. Freshman year, I was in charge of the social media for our school's pickleball team. Self-explanatory.

Despite only playing 12 games a season (give or take one or two more if you were lucky enough to make a bowl game or the playoffs), football was a year-long operation. Freshmen who technically hadn't even graduated high school were on campus for the spring game and spent the summer acclimating for the beginning of the season come the first week of September when football (and school) officially started, so we did the same.

So nowadays, I kind of did everything - or at the very least, I was trained to. If you had told me three years ago I'd be skilled in the art of GoPro drone operating, I would have laughed. When Kayla graduated later this month, the advanced content torch would be passed to me. I'd spent my entire junior year learning from her, which mostly meant following her around like a duckling to her mother, and I'd have my own little duckling come fall term when I was officially the reigning senior. That was how it always had been.

"Can you just tell me already?" I groaned at Kayla as she scanned us into the side entrance to the building. "I get anticipatory heartburn."

The arctic level air conditioning hit me as soon as we walked in and chilled the sweat dripping down my back. My Hoka sneakers squeaked on the freshly waxed linoleum floors as I followed Kayla to our conference room. Through the all-glass door I saw our faculty supervisor Elijah talking animatedly to a woman in a suit I didn't recognize.

"Ah, from the trenches, they emerge," Elijah said with a grin as we walked in. He gestured to the woman in the suit. "This is Mariah Roe, she's currently the head of content production for ESPN's College Gameday."

His remark was directed at me, not Kayla, and when I looked over at her, her smirk was the widest it had been all day.

"You're here to see me?" I asked, poking myself in the chest.

She nodded and outstretched her hand to me. "We've heard great things about you, Josephine."

"Oh...thank you. I'm flattered." I wiped my hands on my jeans before shaking hers. We all sat down in the cushy orange chairs surrounding the conference table, and I couldn't stop my leg from jittering.

I'd applied for the College Gameday internship on a whim, the way that you apply to an Ivy League school knowing that the probability of you getting in was 1 in 100,000. But there she was, about to make me that 1.

"We'd just like to formally offer you the work-study internship for the upcoming season," she continued, and my heart felt like it could have exploded through my chest. "I know you weren't expecting to hear back until the end of August, but the project we'd like you to work on for this role requires content from summer sessions."

I beamed at her, inching myself so close I almost slid right off my chair. "That's great. That's...I'm down. I'm ready. What's the project?"

Perhaps I should have been a little more professional considering I was speaking to one of the highest ranking creative executives in the exact line of work I wanted to be in, but I didn't care. I wanted to work for College Gameday, and there couldn't be any harm in her knowing how thrilled I was to get this opportunity. Casual apathy wasn't cool anymore. Being excited was cool. Being passionate was cool. At least I thought it was.

"Clemson's media department is one of the best in the country," she continued, folding her hands delicately in front of her. "So we'd like to collaborate with the department on a season-long profile piece. You'd be at the forefront of helping us produce it."

I wired my jaw shut to prevent it from dropping open. She didn't even need to name him. There was only one person anyone would want season-long access to in the upcoming season.

I didn't bother turning around as the door opened again. I could already feel his shadow looming over me.

"You wanted to see me?"

━━━━━━

hiya, welcome to BIG SHOT ! as usual, my opening authors notes will be long 🤷🏼‍♀️

i haven't written a story involving football since BLIND AMBITION (2020-2021), but this will be on a whole different level. that was high school - this is big time division one ncaa football. it was the thing i dreamt of spending my professional journalism career in. while that ended up not working out, i'm still truly a student of sports and the culture of sports, but most especially college football, and it's something i'm very excited to explore through fiction and through a female lead like jo who is just as obsessed as i am. please don't hesitate to ask questions if there is something that is unclear !

on a slightly related note; i know lately a lot of us have been struggling with engagement on our stories, so this is the place where i tell you that thoughts and comments throughout the story are strongly encouraged (within the realm of being positive and respectful) and ask that you not be a silent reader. i put a lot of my time and effort into creating these stories, and i would be so appreciative if you put in the same as a reader <3