New baseball stadium at Marshall is dream come true for legendary Coach Jack Cook
The day the announcement of a new baseball stadium reverberated through Huntington, Coach Jack Cook borrowed a line from former Reds’ broadcaster Joe Nuxhall.
“I’m rounding third and heading for home,” Cook said. “You better hurry up.”
No one deserves to see a new ballpark more than the 93-year-old former Marshall baseball coach. He’s been waiting for more than half a century to get the news that the program would have its own on-campus facility. In fact, the absence of a stadium almost kept him from accepting the job in 1967.
“Whitey Wilson was the athletic director,” said Cook, “and I was having pretty good success at Huntington High. We had won three state championships. He wanted me to come to Marshall and I was reluctant at first. I said, ‘We don’t have a field.’ And he said, ‘We’ll get a field when you get here.’”
Cook’s teams played a bulk of their games at the old St. Cloud Commons ballpark in Huntington’s west end. Getting the field playable was oftentimes a major problem.
“It flooded every spring,” said Cook. “We would be playing down south, and when we came back to Huntington we had to get all the catfish and the carp off the field.”
Cook is the all-time winningest coach at Marshall with 422 wins. He took two teams (1973 and 1978) to the NCAA tournament. In the 1978 tournament, his team beat Florida State and Clemson before losing to Miami of Florida in two straight games, falling one game short of making it to the College World Series.
The day of the stadium announcement, Cook said, “This is probably the happiest day of my life.”
————
About the author: Keith Morehouse is sports director at WSAZ NewsChannel 3. He is a two-time Emmy winner and received the West Virginia Sportscaster of the Year award in 1999, 2007 and 2012. He graduated from Marshall University in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Broadcast Journalism.
————
Photos (from top):
Jack Cook was Marshall University’s head baseball coach from 1967 to 1989. He was inducted into the Marshall Athletics Hall of Fame in 1994.
Former Head Baseball Coach Jack Cook holds a sign proclaiming 24th Street between 4th Avenue and 5th Avenue as Honorary Coach Jack Cook Way.