Skutt Catholic baseball coach Damon Day was out of coaching and didn’t know if he would coach again. 

After 15 years, 394 wins and four NCAA Tournament appearances as the head baseball coach at the University of Nebraska-Kearney, the school decided to drop the baseball program in 2018. 

Five years later, the self-proclaimed washed-up Division II baseball coach pursued an opportunity to do something he didn’t know he would get to do again: lead a team. 

In July of 2023, while a professor at UNK and conducting some private baseball lessons in Kearney, Day was at a futures game watching his eighth-grade son, Bubba. 

In the stands, sitting next to current Omaha Westside coach Jason Shockey, Day was ready to get back into coaching. 

“He (Shockey) turned to me and said, ‘You know Skutt just opened up,’” Day said. “I looked at him and said, ‘That would be something I’d be interested in.’”

The timing wasn’t the best. Day and his family had clearly established roots in Kearney and Bubba was getting ready to start his freshman year of high school just two weeks later. 

Day made the first move. A call to Skutt athletic director Donn Kasner turned into multiple conversations with Kasner and Skutt president Dr. Jeremy Moore.

They set up a meeting in Omaha, which lasted roughly three hours. Day’s wife, Jessica, had a feeling her family’s life was going to be turned upside down.

“I was walking around my parents’ house in Omaha and it was three and a half, four hours,” she said. “I looked at the kids and said, ‘ You better get ready, I think this is going to happen.’”

Day accepted the job on a Friday. He and his future star son, Bubba, moved to Omaha two days later on a Sunday. 

Miles Apart

The Days are a close family. 

Bubba, Nebraska’s top-ranked baseball player in the 2027 class, committed to Florida State on Feb. 6, 2026, flipping his commitment from Tennessee after a coaching change.

There’s Damon, the longtime baseball coach; Jessica, a former basketball and volleyball coach at Millard South; and then there is the youngest, now 16-year-old Emma.

As a family, the Days had a decision to make in the summer of 2023. Pack up everything on a whim and leave Kearney for an entirely new life, or let the two males in the family follow their baseball dreams while Jessica and Emma stay in Kearney. 

They decided to live apart, at least for one year, so Emma could finish middle school with the friends she had grown up with. That meant Bubba’s biggest supporter, his little sister Emma, would need to live without seeing her brother and dad every day. 

“She’s super close with her dad,” Jessica said. “I’m kind of that person for Bubba that’s not baseball, a place where he can come and just talk about all of the other things. To be separated from him, I felt like I missed a year of Bubba’s life, and Damon felt like he missed a year of Emma’s in that transition. We knew it was time, so we were willing to make the sacrifice in that moment.”

The year away from each other wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, as the saying goes. The travel back and forth from Kearney to Omaha and vice versa took a toll.

“There were only a couple of times where I was like, ‘My God, we’re crazy,’” Jessica said. “This is not going to work. One time, I was heading on I-80, heading back to Kearney in a snowstorm, and he’s like, ‘Honey, I know how you feel.’
I said, ‘No, you don’t.’ I remember just yelling at him.”

Those were the moments where the doubt crept in. The space between the family became larger and larger. 

“In those moments, and when your daughter is kind of getting ousted from her friend group, because she’s not going to be part of it, I did wonder, like, gosh, was this all worth it to combust the family unit here for this year?” Jessica said. “The good Lord’s got the plan and he had the light to the path as far as what was to come. We just trusted that this is where we were supposed to be.”

After a year of car rides back and forth from Kearney to Omaha, the Days decided it was time for them to once again be a whole family unit in Omaha. 

“It’s tough. It’s tough for a year,” Damon said. “There were a lot of tears, a lot of car rides, a lot of listening to — (Emma) listens to horrible music that I have to listen to. I think that’s what makes Skutt such a special place. It’s just the overall family atmosphere. She was welcomed with open arms.

“I’m just super proud of her because it ain’t easy being Bubba Day’s little sister,” Damon said. “I always have to tell her, all he does is throw a projectile hard. It doesn’t make him a special human being; she’s the special human being in our family. She sacrificed a lot for us to get this opportunity. She’s Bubba’s biggest fan, so there’s not an animosity type of thing.”

The Vision 

It had been nine years (2017) since Skutt Catholic won a baseball state championship. The SkyHawks’ last runner-up finish was 2016. 

Day led the SkyHawks and their baseball program down a new path, one that was faith-based and that wasn’t about the flashy uniforms or loud chirping from the dugout. 

“To be a coach in a faith-based environment and just get a group of young people to believe in themselves, I think that’s huge,” Damon said. “We don’t talk a lot. We just talk about doing your job, showing up every day, being on time, doing things the right way, treating people with respect, and the game will take care of you.”

In the 2026 Class B Baseball State Tournament, the SkyHawks won each of their three games by one run to claim the state championship. Day’s plan paid off. 

“I think we learned that in this tournament — if you do things right enough times, good things are gonna happen to you,” Damon said.
”That vision was to get a group of kids to believe in themselves, believe in playing for each other, and I think you saw that in this entire state tournament. Different guys stepping up every time, different roles, different things, and I think that’s probably what I’m most proud of is just the way we hung in there. I think today was a microcosm of everything we’ve tried to build over the last three years of just fighting to the last out, finding a way, and we did that.”

The SkyHawks taking a chance on the old, washed-up baseball coach paid off. 

“They gave me a chance and believed in my vision,” Damon said moments after winning Saturday’s championship. “I just can’t thank my administration enough for believing in us and understanding where we wanted to go and how we wanted to do it. So without their support, we wouldn’t be here today.”

Worth It

Damon has a bit of a misunderstood, gruff demeanor, one that is intimidating if you don’t know him.

If you think you know Damon Day, you really don’t. 

The tall man with the sunglasses has a bass-filled voice. He isn’t soft spoken, yet he doesn’t say much. When he speaks, you listen.

A walk-off, game-winning hit, in extra innings, by the star player that happens to be the coach’s son is something they write Disney movies about, Damon said after the win. 

“He said he loved me,” Bubba said. “He said he was proud of me, but there was also a moment where we said we talked about how we were going to do it, and so that was a big thing. I said we really did it, and that hug for us was amazing.”

When Jessica saw her husband put the gold medal around her son’s neck, it wasn’t only the joyous emotions. It was the memories of a son and father growing up and growing together. 

With tears in her eyes, Jessica, the rock of the family, let her emotions flow. 

“I don’t know if people know how incredibly close those two (Damon and Bubba) are,” Jessica said, whipping a tear from her cheek. “This is a little boy at the age of 4 that was on every bus ride with the Lopers, that had a family of boys that took care of him, played catch with him and hit with him. I showed up at one game one time, and my son is in left field, shagging balls while the All-American Dallas Schramm is just chucking them in the outfield, and I was like, ‘Put a helmet on him.'”

Almost every father and son play catch at some point in their lives together. However, most don’t get to share a moment like the Days did on Saturday.

“These two have just literally grown up together on the field, and that moment was pretty, pretty exceptional,” Jessica said. “So it was all worth it. It’s all worth it.”

 

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