Coach Carrerra enters the locker room. He’s a man of few words and gets right down to business. “We’ll have offensive drills and unarmed combat practice this morning. Primary positions. Quarterbacks with me. Halfbacks and fullbacks with Coach Johnson. Centers, guards, tackles with Coach Fernandez. Ends with Coach Miller. And don’t forget your play books. Hidden safeties, you’ll be spending the whole day with Coach Leicht at the rifle range. For the defensive drills and weapons sessions this afternoon, free and deep safeties and middle linebackers with me, Coach Stassen and Coach Ralan. Linemen and ends with Coach Immura. Zack,” Zack Rauscher is the Prospectors’ mediman, “I’ve got you set up to spend the day at Stanford studying with Doc Zimmerman and his orthopedic group.”

T.K. notes his assignments. He’ll be with Coach Carrerra both morning and afternoon. In street football, where there are no substitutions, every man plays both offense and defense. On defense, T.K.’s primary position is free safety. (Sooner or later before the actual start of the season, he as well as every other man on the team will also get secondary cross training in every other position, both offensive and defensive. This so that in the event of an injury or a death, players can, at the quarterback’s discretion, switch around between positions.)

The Prospectors practice on a rundown street in an industrial section of Hunter’s Point, an area just south of San Francisco. It’s an ideal practice area. It doesn’t get much traffic, there are some fairly good-sized buildings for use in vertical wind sprints, there are few, if any, people living there, and except for the early morning and late evening rush hours, the street is almost deserted.

Coach Carrerra takes T.K. and his two backup quarterbacks, a four-year veteran named Halloran and a rookie named Tross, who was the talk of the Big Ten last year, out to the goalyard, a line three feet long with upright poles implanted on each end. This is the line that must be crossed for a touchdown.

“I’ve been working on this new maneuver,” he tells them, “for goalyard penetration. I want your opinions before I put it in the play book.” He puts one of his mechanical blocking dummies in front of the yard. Coach Carrerra is hooked on technology. He never uses a plain steel and cotton dummy if there’s a mechanical one that will do the same job. The situation he sets up, the goalyard with one defender standing in front of it, is a relatively common situation in street football, seen quite often in a game. Having a man on the yard virtually guarantees one last chance to prevent penetration, but it also negates the effectiveness of the hidden safety since he can’t use his gun if there’s a defensive man between the ball carrier and the goalyard.