HOUSTON — Before the start of each new basketball season, in what has become a new tradition at North Forest High School in Houston, coach Trey Washington hands out jersey No. 22 to his best player.

Last season, it went to a guard named Elijah Lewis, who now plays at Concordia University in Austin.

This season, it belongs to Sonny Cousins, a McDonald’s All-American nominee.

The gesture pays homage to one Jonathon Simmons, who last wore it for the school on the city’s northeast side — at what was then called M.B. Smiley High — in 2008.

“It’s a good feeling that they’d even consider something like that,” said Simmons, now a 26-year-old rookie guard with the Spurs.

Having arrived at the school in 2010, Washington never coached Simmons.

Nor did Simmons ever technically play for North Forest, which did not exist until 2013, when the state shut down Smiley High for academic underperformance.

If it seems odd for a high school to honor a not-quite alumnus who has yet to complete a full season in the NBA, consider this:

Washington began treating No. 22 as his team’s ultimate honor last season, when Simmons was still in the Development League.

“There’s not too much that’s positive coming of this community,” Washington said. “We don’t have pros come out of this neighborhood. To see one of our own be successful, it means everything.”

On the map, it is about 13 miles from the blighted, forgotten corner of Houston that Simmons still calls home to the Toyota Center, where the Spurs close their rodeo trip Saturday against the Rockets.

For Simmons, it took what felt like a lifetime to make the trip.

At this time a year ago, Simmons was living hand-to-mouth in the D-League in Austin, sometimes borrowing money to buy diapers for his young children or lunch for himself.

Now he is a rotation player for a 49-7 Spurs team that come June could be competing for an NBA title.

“That’s the greatest story in basketball,” said Earl Watson, one of Simmons’ coaches in the D-League last season. “It’s not LeBron James. It’s not Kobe Bryant retiring. It’s Jonathon Simmons.”

Mouths to feed

LaTonya Simmons has worked for United Airlines for 18 years. She is a gate agent now, up most mornings before dawn to make her 6 a.m. shift at Bush Intercontinental Airport.

On the job, she is easy to spot.

LaTonya Simmons is the only gate agent in Houston with a Spurs ball on the antennae of her walkie-talkie and a Spurs chain on her key ring.

“I was always a Rockets fan,” she said. “When my son became a Spur, I had to get acclimated. I had to show some team spirit, some Mom pride.”

A single mother, LaTonya Simmons raised two boys and two girls on her United paycheck. Jonathon is her oldest by five years.

Like every parent, she worried daily for her son as he grew up and searched for direction.

Jonathon Simmons was still in college when he had his first daughter in 2010.

“Then came No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 (all girls),” LaTonya Simmons said. “I said, ‘I’m going to need you to get a job.’”

She couldn’t have known the job her oldest son would ultimately land would be in the NBA.

‘Basketball saved his life’

The “greatest story in basketball” could have ended up a sad cautionary tale.

Simmons was a reluctant student at Smiley High, at times cutting class to stay home or hang with friends.

Beyond showing up enough to stay eligible to play basketball and eventually graduate, Simmons didn’t see the point.

To Simmons, it didn’t seem as if the school cared much about his education either.

“They didn’t make it easy to go to school,” Simmons said. “I’d have seven classes a day. One of them is basketball. Another two or three, there were like substitute teachers. You’re not really learning anything. It defeats the purpose of what am I going to school for?”

A 2007 Johns Hopkins study labeled Smiley a “dropout factory,” with 40 percent of freshmen failing to last through their senior year.

In 2009, one year after Simmons left, the Texas Education Agency deemed Smiley “academically unacceptable.”

In 2013, the state intervened, shutting down the high school — which by then had merged with another school and been renamed North Forest High — and the North Forest school district. The Houston Independent School District took over operations.

A year later, a Houston Chronicle reporter visited the school and found conditions had improved since the state takeover. Among the positive changes noted by the newspaper: Students were no longer setting fires in the restrooms and the halls no longer felt “like a party.”

Against that chaotic backdrop, it is a wonder a kid like Simmons had any shot at all.

When Simmons was a sophomore in 2006, his maternal grandmother — Jerusha Simmons, who helped raise him — died suddenly of a heart attack one morning while he was at school.

Her death sent Simmons deeper into a tailspin. He felt he had lost an anchor.

“It took a tremendous toll on him,” LaTonya Simmons said. “It took a toll on all of us.”

That summer, Simmons began a growth spurt that would take him from 5-foot-7 to 6-3 in the span of a few months.

His outlook began to brighten when the college recruitment letters started coming. The first, his mother believes, came from Michigan State during her son’s junior year.

“Once he came to realize where basketball could take him, his attitude changed,” LaTonya Simmons said. “Basketball saved his life.”

Money well spent

Having been too laissez faire about his grades for too long to qualify for a Division I school, Simmons played two seasons at two junior colleges before landing at the University of Houston in 2011.

He averaged 14 points and five rebounds as a junior in his only season with the Cougars. Then, against the advice of his coaches and NBA scouts, Simmons opted to forgo his senior year and enter the draft.

James Dickey, Simmons’ coach at Houston, feared for him.

“We understood what Jonathon’s goals were, and we thought he had the talent,” said Dickey, now an assistant at Oklahoma State. “We felt at that point he was hearing what he wanted to hear as opposed to reality. I’ve seen a lot of kids in his situation told, ‘You’re going to make it,’ when that’s not reality.

“I didn’t want that to happen to Jonathon.”

Looking back, Simmons admits he attempted the jump too soon.

At the time, he was unhappy in college and had three daughters to support. He was also naïve.

“I wasn’t informed or educated about the D-League or playing overseas or anything like that,” Simmons said. “People never came to explain stuff like that to us.”

After going undrafted, Simmons was left to wander the basketball backwaters and try to make ends meet.

He didn’t have a Plan B. His mother urged him to enroll in barber school.

Simmons played one season with the Sugar Land Legends of the now-defunct American Basketball League in 2012-13. That fall, he scraped together the $150 registration fee required to try out for the Spurs’ D-League affiliate in Austin, then named the Toros.

It turned out to be the best $150 Simmons ever spent. He made the D-League, and played in Austin for two seasons.

‘Our worries are over’

It took one final perfect storm to vault Simmons from the D-League to the NBA.

Last summer, the Spurs were looking to inject some youth and athleticism into their backcourt mix. With a payroll over the salary cap, thanks to maximum contracts given to Kawhi Leonard and LaMarcus Aldridge, they were looking to fill the spot on the cheap.

General manager R.C. Buford cast an eye toward the D-League, asking Austin coach Ken McDonald and his staff for recommendations.

Watson had already departed for Phoenix — he is now the Suns’ interim coach — but others on the staff remembered how he had championed Simmons at earlier meetings.

Truth be told, Watson — a former journeyman NBA point guard — had a soft spot for the young man.

“I bought him lunch a couple times last year, because he didn’t have money to eat,” Watson said. “I had to help him buy shoes, because he didn’t have any shoes.”

But Watson also believed this: Simmons could play.

“I saw things you couldn’t teach,” Watson said. “Most importantly, I saw how big his heart is.”

Watson told the Spurs something else about Simmons:

“If he is a part of the D-League for another season,” Watson said, “he’s going to be the MVP of the league.”

It was a low-risk gamble, and the Spurs took it.

Simmons was in Orlando, playing with the Brooklyn Nets’ summer league team in July, when he fielded the call from his agent that the Spurs were offering him a guaranteed NBA contract.

The first person he phoned was his mother.

LaTonya Simmons was at work, on a bus shuttling between terminals with other United employees, when she got the news.

“I jumped off the bus and screamed, ‘Thank you, Jesus!’” LaTonya Simmons recalls. “I didn’t care who heard me.”

Simmons’ contract is modest by NBA standards: Two seasons at $1.4 million, with only about $525,000 guaranteed.

To Simmons, his mother and now four daughters, the money was life-changing.

“Our worries are over,” LaTonya Simmons said before chuckling. “I never have to buy another Pamper again.”

Courage and heart

Simmons’ remarkable tale did not end there. He has been a revelation for the Spurs this season, appearing in 44 games off the bench and averaging 5.9 points.

He has impressed teammates with his explosiveness, good for at least one jaw-dropping dunk every few games. Coach Gregg Popovich has repeatedly praised Simmons as “fearless.”

Popovich believes the perseverance Simmons used to make the NBA should help him stick now that he is here.

“It takes character strong enough to handle the fact that in the beginning, nobody loved you,” Popovich said. “It’s important to believe in yourself and keep going.”

Spurs forward Rasual Butler, a 13-year veteran who took a similar hardscrabble path to the NBA, sees in Simmons a kindred spirit.

“He’s a fighter,” said Butler, who has become Simmons’ mentor. “He had the courage and heart to go after his dreams. He took the hard route. I respect him for that.”

Paying it forward

One day earlier this month, during the NBA All-Star break, Simmons was back in his old stomping grounds.

He returned to North Forest High, in the gym that used to be Smiley’s, to watch the team that used to be Smiley’s face Yates High, a traditional Houston power.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Yates was a basketball factory, producing NBA players such as Michael Young and Rickie Winslow. More recently, Young’s son Joe — now of the Indiana Pacers — played there.

Smiley/North Forest has produced exactly one NBA player: Simmons.

After the game, Simmons addressed the team, including Cousins, the new standard-bearer for No. 22.

Simmons — who dons No. 17 for the Spurs — says it is important to remain connected to his old neighborhood.

“Guys don’t go back to the city,” Simmons said. “That’s a big thing I want to do, be active in the city.”

Simmons considers himself a role model for those who came after him, proof that there is life beyond the neighborhood.

Asked to summarize his message for the kids at North Forest now, Simmons says it’s about “the motivation to keep going.”

“We all grew up in the same spot,” Simmons said. “It’s about having a different focus from everybody else.”

Washington, the coach at North Forest, knows he can’t magically instill Simmons’ NBA talent in his teenage players.

What he can offer them is hope.

He chooses to do this annually, in the form of the No. 22.

“Jonathon is an inspiration to these kids,” Washington said. “I want to keep honoring him, and as long as I’m here, that’s what I’m going to do.”

jmcdonald@express-news.net

Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN