After 44 years of coaching, Bill Merrell is calling it a career, but that doesn’t mean Merrell is completely walking away from the thing he loves.
The 67-year-old plans to help his son coach baseball and also wants to spend time watching his granddaughter play softball – all in Oklahoma.
But as far as being a fulltime coach in Boerne, Merrell is done and is moving back to Perryton where he has a home on the Texas/ Oklahoma border. He’ll visit his family in Norman, Oklahoma on a regular basis.
He leaves coaching after 44 years, 30 in Perryton and the last 14 in Boerne.
“I’m just heading north and still coaching baseball, I’m just not the head guy,” Merrell said. “I hate to leave but after 44 years it’s time for me to move on and do something else. I’d probably coach forever if they let me, but my granddaughter is 10 and I want to spend time watching her. I’m not retiring, I’m becoming a fulltime grandfather.”
Merrell retires with 696 career wins at Perryton and Boerne High combined, but isn’t worried about the numbers. He would have had a whole lot more victories but Perryton didn’t have a baseball team the first 10 years he was at the school.
“I started coaching in 1979 and we implemented baseball in 1989 so I’ve been coaching baseball for 34 years, but we weren’t chasing the numbers, we were trying to get to Austin (for the state tournament),” he said.
Merrell did get to Austin with Perryton back in 2004, the same year the Boerne High baseball team won state, but Perryton was in a different classification.
In his 14 years at Boerne, Merrell took the Greyhounds to the regional finals twice – in his first and last years at BHS – to bookend his BHS career, but didn’t get to state, however the coach says he has no regrets.
“You can’t look back and ask, ‘what if’? That’s what baseball teaches you, you have to make adjustments and move on and live in the moment,” he said. “Baseball teaches you discipline and that tomorrow is a new day. Get on and move on. In 14 years, I hope that’s the most important lesson we’ve learned.”
One thing that motivated Merrell during his time coaching baseball was one thing a Perryton school board member told him when they were starting the baseball program from scratch.
“He told me that we would never be successful and I always thought about that and chewed on that over the years,” Merrell said. “I think we proved him wrong and we proved him wrong in Boerne.” Geoff Curtin has been named as Merrell’s successor and Merrell said he wishes the new coach well.
“Boerne is a gold mine with a lot of good kids so you’ll always have a chance (at state), whoever takes over will be successful. We’ve left a great bunch of kids to build off of, so go do it,” he said. “They’ll have great support, but we’ve set the bar pretty high.”
So what was Merrell’s final message to the Boerne community?
“It’s been a heck of an unbelievable ride,” he said. “It’s been a blessing to be here. What a great group we’ve had. It’s a great community with very supportive fans that are classy people.”
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