With seven state championships, 26 conference championships and 802 career wins over a 39-year varsity coaching career at Cathedral, Mertz’s historic coaching career came to a close in 2018 when he retired with an 802-141 record in 2018.

That was until a special request from his daughter Shannon Hillesheim pulled him back into action. This time, however, Mertz’s return call to coaching came at the JV level for the Cathedral Greyhounds in 2022.

Shannon Hillesheim said she’s been a summer league coach since her daughter Abbey Hillesheim has been in the 10U program. But after Cathedral Activities Director Alan Woitas asked about her interest in coaching JV last year, Shannon Hillesheim stepped up to the plate.

“I’ve coached my daughter’s summer team for a couple years now already and I know the AD well at school,” she said. “So they needed a JV coach and kind of out of the blue [Alan] sent me a text, and he’s like, ‘Hey, how about coaching JV this year?’ And I was, like, ‘What?’ So we talked it through and I had to make sure it would work out with work here just because it’s a commitment with high school ball.”

Shannon Hilleshem and Bob Mertz eye the field during a JV softball game this season.

Mertz, who was vacationing in Arizona at the time, then got a call and a request from his daughter to assist her with the JV team. While he admitted he and is wife, Linda, don’t like the cold weather in Minnesota, he was willing to return from Arizona to help his daughter in April.

To Shannon Hillesheim’s surprise, her pitch to make her dad come back didn’t need much selling.

“I thought I was going to have to do a lot of convincing him,” Shannon Hillesheim said. “But once I told him I was doing it, he said, ‘Mom and I talked, and I decided if you really wanted to do this, I would help you, I would come back.’ And he’s got such a passion for the program yet and doesn’t want to see it fail.”

Mertz said he’d liked to have helped the team more in April, but he and his wife weren’t interested in returning to Minnesota early anymore from their stays in Arizona. That was OK with Shannon Hillesheim, though, as she and the smaller JV squad was able to work with the varsity team.

Mertz’s help was much appreciated, but it didn’t come without the challenge of going from coaching varsity to coaching JV.

Bob Mertz hits fly balls to his Cathedral fielders before a JV softball game this season at Harman Park in New Ulm.

“For 39 years I’m coaching varsity and here I’m working with a different age group,” Mertz said. “I wasn’t sure how that was going to go. I’m really a stickler on mechanics and fundamentals. I really would like to be there those two and a half weeks in the gym [before the season], because that’s where all that happens, you can get repetition and change things. And it’s hard to do that during the season when you have games because after a game, the next day you want to practice on some of the things that you saw you needed to work on.

“But I tried to work with them, and we had such an age group, too. Six freshmen, four eighth-graders and one seventh-grader this year. So you have a different span of ability there and I’m trying to work with them on whatever we can with hitting mechanics and the fundamentals of fielding and throwing and just helping them to get ready for the next level.”

One added perk of coaching the JV team for Shannon Hillesheim was the chance to coach her daughter Abbey Hillesheim outside of summer ball. That was also an incentive for Mertz to return as he got the chance to coach his granddaughter.

“It was neat, and really I treated her like anybody else,” Mertz said. “I didn’t try to treat her special. When she did things she needed to work on, I brought that to her also. And she understands it, too. She wants to get better and she knows she can get better by getting good instruction and I’ve tried to do that for her. But it went really well, I thought.”

Mertz’s first Greyhounds softball team to make it to the state tournament was in 1989, when his daughter was a junior on the team. Shannon Hillesheim said the team was overwhelmed a little by the competition at state, but it was a good experience and memory she and her dad carry with them.

Abbey Hillesheim finished her freshman season at pitcher for the Cathedral JV squad a few weeks ago and will look to take another step forward next season.

Shannon Hillesheim said that being a head coach with her dad and having the chance to coach her daughter at the JV level has been interesting in several ways.

“This would be the first time I had coached an entire league of her peers, they’re all her friends from school,” Shannon Hillesheim said. “So I think just from that standpoint, too, it maybe added a little bit more stress when you’ve got kids and you’re trying to work with kids and they’re getting frustrated, all the things that go in with just the mental side of the game, too.

“And my dad is used to varsity, so he kind of talks to them like they’re varsity players [laughs], which I tried to prepare the girls, too. He’s going to tell you how it is, he’s going to tell you what you’re doing wrong, he’s going to tell you what he needs to see. If he didn’t see it, he’s going to tell you you’re still not doing it. But that will only make you better players. It has nothing against you, it’s different. He’s got that old style of coaching. But I said he’s succesful, the banners in the gym prove it, so listen to him.”

Mertz said his daughter has done a great job of bringing the girls together.

“Shannon does such a nice job with team building, bringing a team together,” Mertz said. “I was really impressed, but she’s got that from work as a bank president, they do a lot of that, too.”

While Mertz is known for providing some tough love now and again at the varsity level, Shannon Hillesheim said the past two years have been a good balance and learning experience for her and the girls on the team.

“I think for the most part, especially Abbey’s group that know him better, too, kind of understood some of where he was going,” Shannon Hillesheim said. “But I learned a lot coaching with him, and I’m sure the girls learned a lot, so that was good.”

Abbey Hillesheim pitched for the JV team. After wrapping up her freshman season, she’ll have the chance to join the varsity squad next season.

She said while she had some added pressure on her as the granddaughter and daughter of the team’s coaches, she’s learned a lot.

“There were definitely some times when I was under a lot more pressure and I felt a little bit stressed out, but all of that comes from the fact that this is school ball and not summer,” she said. “You’re supposed to take it more serious and be more focused on what you’re doing. However, even through all of this, there’s no denying that both my mom and grandpa know what they are talking about. They’ve been around the sport their whole lives and it’s nice to be able to learn everything they’ve learned through the course of their careers.”

One major thing Abbey Hillesheim has learned under her mom and grandpa about softball is how important the mental game is.

“A major key point that I have learned from them is your mental game tops any physical ability you have,” she said. “They religiously teach us that if you make a mistake — or aren’t having the best game — that you have to put it aside and move on. I think it was super important for them to be drilling this into my head because if I get into the habit now of just moving onto the next play and not internalizing the whole thing, it won’t become a problem once I get into the level of playing varsity.”

Abbey Hillesheim also said developing more of a softball IQ was something she’s learned at the JV level.

“Knowing where to throw the ball, where to hit the ball in specific situations, learning your surroundings and circumstances,” she said. “These were all huge points that they taught and they were very useful to make the most effective play when were in a game.”

This generational experience the three were able to share over the past two years isn’t something many families are able to do.

“It’s been very special,” Shannon Hillesheim said. “I’m just grateful. For something that wasn’t even on my radar that I wanted to do, but grateful for that opportunity. And grateful more so just from the experiences I learned from coaching with my dad that has made me a better coach now to help [Abbey] with things and to bring back to my summer ball when I coach there. Just from that aspect, there’s a lot of daily phone calls, sometimes multiple times during the day, it’s certainly brought us closer on a different level. So it’s been a really neat experience.”

After finishing their second season coaching the JV team, both Mertz and Shannon Hillesheim have said this would be their last year coaching the team as they will be stepping back to spectate next season.