The Story of a Baseball Coach with Down Syndrome
Happy Like Coach Jack is a true story about a young man nobody expected much from—and what happened when a whole community quit making allowances and expected everything he had to give.
Jack Simmons has Down syndrome. Before baseball, most of his afternoons went to sports video games and a quiet hope that someday there might be more. When a traveling youth baseball team in St. George, Utah invited him on as an assistant coach, they wanted nothing more than to do something kind. Nobody expected what came next — not the players, not the parents, not even the father who thought he already understood his son.
Told through the eyes of Jack's father, Happy Like Coach Jack follows what happens when a community decides not to make room for someone, but simply lets him take his place in it. Somewhere along the way, Jack started working toward a goal nobody around him even knew he had.
This is a book about community, about youth sports at their best, and about a young man with an intellectual disability who was never told to stop reaching for more. It is funny, it's thoughtful, it's tender, and every word of it is true.
Readers who loved the way A Man Called Ove finds a whole town rearranging itself around one unlikely man, or the way Wonder makes its case for human dignity without ever raising its voice, will recognize this feeling. It's just that nobody had to make this one up.
A memoir written by award winning author, John M. Simmons.
The book, at just over 28,000 words, tells the story of the author’s adult son, Jack, who has Down syndrome.
