Knockout at the Community Pool
Seventeen-year-old Jalen Hernandez knows every cracked tile and coughing pump at Eastside Community Aquatic Ce
Seventeen-year-old Jalen Hernandez knows every cracked tile and coughing pump at Eastside Community Aquatic Center. It is where he trains for regionals, works after school, and learned that water can be both home and fear. When the city threatens to close the public pool unless it accepts a private club's rescue plan, Jalen sees what the polished proposal leaves out: beginner classes, family nights, adaptive swim time, and neighbors who cannot afford to be pushed somewhere else.
Saving Eastside means winning races that give the team leverage, but Jalen's pressure to stay perfect starts to break him. His fastest rival may hold proof that the club's numbers are rigged toward medal swimmers, yet trusting him could cost them both. As a final relay and a city hearing collide, Jalen must decide whether leadership means chasing the fastest time or refusing to leave people behind.
A tense contemporary YA sports novel about competition, panic, friendship, and fighting for space to belong.
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By eight in the morning, concrete around Eastside Community Aquatic Center had begun to hold heat like a grudge.
Jalen Hernandez dragged the skimmer along the gutter line, catching a drift of cedar pollen, a Band-Aid wrapper, and three leaves that had somehow survived January in San Antonio. The water looked blue from deck level. Down in it, it looked green at the seams, where old tile met older grout.
"Basket next," Ms. Ibarra called from the pump room door.
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