Page from the Playbook

Odyssey is buzzing with excitement: for the first time in ages, the football team is good enough to play for the state championship. Buck Oliver, in his first season, has become a star wide receiver, and his friend Cooper Calhoun is the starting quarterback for Cooper's dad, Coach Calhoun. Even Jay Smouse has caught championship fever, though in his own way - he has been secretly collecting the players' water bottles, sunglasses, dirty socks, and half-eaten hamburgers to sell to fans as souvenirs. Before practice, Cooper introduces Buck to Drew Reagles, a friendly new kid who has just moved to town. Drew injured his shoulder playing football last year, so he is helping out as the team's new equipment manager, and he clearly knows the game - he even gushes over Buck's famous touchdown catch against Connellsville.

Coach Calhoun has a surprise for the team: with an assistant coach having moved away, he has filled the spot with someone who has "a great analytical mind" - Buck's foster dad, Eugene Meltsner. Eugene greets the team with a hearty "Greetings and salutations!" and coaches exactly the way one would expect. He lectures the boys on why a football is shaped like a pig bladder, calls the end zone the "region of finality," diagrams passing routes with degrees and curvatures, and hands every player a protractor to keep. Buck is embarrassed, especially when Jay teases him about it in the locker room. Drew kindly sticks up for Buck and offers to tutor him in algebra, since Buck is struggling in the class. That evening Buck gently tells Eugene he will study with Drew instead, because Drew is easier to understand - words that clearly sting. That same night, Coach Calhoun stops by the Meltsner house to drop off a copy of the team playbook for Eugene.

Buck and Drew become real friends. Drew explains algebra in a way that finally makes sense, and he opens up about his life: his parents are divorced, and his dad, a busy lawyer, never had time for him, which is why he came to Odyssey to live with his mom. He even tells Buck not to be too hard on Eugene, because having a dad who wants to be involved is something special. Then, just days before the big game, Drew sadly announces that his parents have decided things are not working out, and he is moving back to his dad's - that very night.

Soon afterward, Buck and Cooper are flipping through sample yearbooks for a write-up on the team when they spot a familiar face in last year's Vernon City yearbook: Drew, pictured on the football team of the very school Odyssey is about to play in the championship. Suspicious, Buck checks the side table where Eugene keeps the playbook. It is gone. The boys are stunned - Drew was a spy all along, and now he is headed back to Vernon City just in time for the game. Instead of telling their dads, Buck insists they get even. They recruit Jay with the promise of memorabilia, sneak over to a Vernon City practice, and put Jay in a stolen vole costume - the Vernon City mascot - to distract the team with somersaults, headstands, and dizzy dancing while Cooper plays lookout with binoculars and Buck slips out from under the bleachers. Buck grabs their stolen playbook off the bench and snatches Vernon City's playbook too. The plan seems to work perfectly, right up until a security officer stops them at the car: a teacher watched the whole thing from the press box.

Back home, Coach Calhoun and Eugene are deeply disappointed - and full of surprises. It turns out Eugene figured Drew out at his very first practice. Drew's t-shirt advertised his dad's law firm, which Eugene recognized as a Vernon City business, and a little research revealed Drew had played for the Voles. So Eugene set out the playbook as bait - except it was a fake, the Odyssey Middle School playbook hidden inside a high school cover, containing none of the team's plays. Home security cameras caught Drew taking it, and the coaches had already contacted Vernon City, where it came out that two players had put Drew up to the scam. Drew was punished, and both players - two of Vernon City's best - are suspended from the championship. The boys barely have time to celebrate before Eugene delivers the hard truth: Buck and Cooper cheated in exactly the same way, so they will not be playing either. Buck admits the punishment is fair, but what hurts most is the friendship: "I can't believe I fell for Drew's act."

Eugene offers gentle wisdom in return. Some people will not deserve Buck's trust, but "if you keep everyone at a distance, you'll never trust anyone" - and there are people worth trusting, like Eugene and Katrina, Mr. Whittaker, Coach Calhoun, and Cooper. Buck realizes that whether Drew meant it or not, he was right about one thing: Buck is lucky to have a dad who wants to be part of his life. On game day, Buck and Cooper cheer from the bench beside Eugene, while Jay - his souvenir business literally flushed down the toilet - leads cheers for the Odyssey Owls in a feathered owl costume of his own.