Phoenixville’s Simons Doesn’t Need a Hand

When we use the expression “overcoming the odds” in a sporting context, we usually do so pretty loosely. It’s shorthand for “things didn’t go absolutely swimmingly from the very beginning, but they persevered,” and not a great deal more. What we mean, more often than not, is that the player in question got bad grades, or had a stormy relationship with their coach, or experienced, at a sensitive age, some harrowing but conventional domestic turmoil that they succeeded in spite of.

What we usually don't mean, when we say a player “overcame the odds,” is that the odds they overcame were the absence of appendages that are biomechanically necessary to play the sport they’re playing. But, well, here goes:

Phoenixville High School senior Ben Simons has overcome the odds. He was born without a left hand and forearm, and now he plays lacrosse.

In a fun and inspiring piece from yesterday, the Philadelphia Inquirer detailed the midfielder’s life—from the delivery room where the obstetrician predicted all sports but soccer were out, to May 4 of this year, when he scored the first goal of his career for the Phantoms lacrosse team.

"No one ever treated me differently, and it really helped me be normal, to play the game like everyone else," Simons told the Inquirer.

Read the full story here.