Crackback

Crackback is a 2005 YA fiction novel by John Coy. It follows a high school junior football player. He has big dreams for himself and his team, but he’s quickly stymied by a new coach who takes a disliking to him—and the discovery that many of his teammates are using steroids. He is forced to figure out what is right and what is important to him. Coy has written several young adult novels and nonfiction picture books for younger readers. The title comes from a football term for a block that comes from outside and behind a player.

Miles Manning is in his junior year of high school, and he has high hopes for his football team this year. Everyone’s saying their team will make states this year, and Miles wants to help get them there. So does his father. Mr. Manning was once a high school football player himself, before an ankle injury sidelined him and left his dreams in the dust. Now, Miles’s father pushes his son hard, hoping to realize his dreams through Miles instead.

Things suddenly change when the football coach, Sepoloski, abruptly steps down. He has cancer, and after a hospital stay, his doctors order him to take the year off. The new coach, Stahl, is different, seeming to take an instant disliking to Miles. Coach Stahl takes the fun out of practice and pushes the team to put long hours in at the weight room, lifting and bulking up. Miles doesn’t like the new approach, but goes along with it.



Before the first game of the year, Miles’s best friend Zach takes out a handful of pills and offers one to Miles. Zach says the pills are caffeine and that they’ll give him a performance boost. Miles decides a little caffeine couldn’t hurt, and takes a few pills. He imagines he can feel them working right away, coursing through him. The game starts and Miles zooms through it, taking out the other team’s quarterback and scoring the first touchdown. His team wins easily.

After the game, Miles leaves a few caffeine pills in his pants, and his mother finds them. She has a serious talk with Miles and asks him never to take pills from anyone again. Miles agrees, and his mother trusts him. But soon, Zach has more pills to offer his friend, and they’re not just caffeine. Zach offers Miles steroids, and says all the other players are taking them. Miles isn’t comfortable with taking steroids, even if everyone else is. He looks the pills up online and decides the risks are too dangerous. He stands up to his friends and repeatedly turns down the steroids.

Trouble comes for Miles’s team at the next game. The quarterback, Jonesy, gets injured. And no one else is a good enough quarterback to fill his shoes. Coach Stahl tries a punt offense to win, but Miles is sure it won’t work. It doesn’t, and the teams are tied 7-7. On the last play of the game, Miles makes a mistake, leaving the other team’s running back undefended. The running back scores the winning touchdown for the other team. Coach Stahl is furious at Miles. He criticizes Miles’s defensive playing, and decides to take him off the starting roster. It doesn’t matter that Miles was the team’s best cornerback, and that none of the other players are good in that position. This punishment makes Miles question his whole identity: he’s been a starting player since the fourth grade.



Shunned by his steroid-taking friends and with nothing to do on the team, Miles has to find other outlets. He takes up playing nasty pranks, like going “shining.” He goes with other teens to shine flashlights at people making out in the park at night to startle them. That gets Miles into more trouble. One night, Miles goes shining by himself and gets caught by a man much bigger than he is. The man beats Miles, then ties his hands together and throws him off a small cliff. Miles lands in the water. His nose is broken, but he is otherwise fine.

At home, Miles’s father is alternately supportive and hostile, sometimes agreeing that Coach Stahl was wrong to demote him to second string, and other times agreeing with Stahl’s decision. Miles’s home is sometimes tense, and his parents fight often. His father works long hours, and grew up in an abusive home himself. When he’s angry, he doesn’t always know how to control his temper.

Miles tries to ask out a girl he’s crushing on named Kyra. But Kyra rejects him in favor of the new quarterback—after all, Miles is only a second-string player now. Then Miles meets a new girl named Lucia, and they start going out. Without football to devote himself to, and no football scholarships in his future, Miles is discovering life outside of sports, and branches out.



During the last game before playoffs, Miles is sitting on the bench when the cornerback who replaced him makes a mistake. The team is winning 7-6, and Coach Stahl decides to put Miles back in the game. He tells Miles to stay back, believing the other team won’t try to kick for the other team. But Miles isn’t so sure. He thinks the other team is going to kick, so he abandons his safety position to block the kick. Miles was right—he blocks the kick, and his team wins. They make the cut for playoffs. But Coach Stahl isn’t happy with Miles, and berates him for not following orders. He tells Miles that he won’t be playing another game that season.

Miles doesn’t play football again, but he does have Lucia. And he finds out the truth behind his relationship with his father: his mother tells him that he had an older brother once, Luke. Luke died as an infant before Miles was born. The older brother he never met is the reason Mr. Manning sometimes seems angry with Miles or puts pressure on him to succeed. That new knowledge helps Miles understand his place in his family.

Crackback received positive reviews on publication. Kirkus reviews called the book a “welcome” one that “makes fun of the stupid clichés that surround the sport while maintaining a strong love of the game.” In 2008, Coy wrote another book about the world of high school sports with Box Out, this time focusing on basketball.