Well, when you truly love what you’ve been doing for so long, how do you know when it’s time to go? – Mike Shoell
HEBER CITY – At the beginning of the 2015-16 school year, Wasatch High School head baseball coach, Mike Shoell, decided this year would be his last in the dugout and he would retire from coaching at the end of the season.
Fighting the urge to carry on and stay with the program he claims destiny brought him to, the 29-year prep coaching veteran did what he thought was best for himself, his family and the growing Wasatch community.
“Well, when you truly love what you’ve been doing for so long, how do you know when it’s time to go?” Shoell asked. “I thought maybe we were done a couple years ago. But then you get asked to do one more, then just one more. Eventually the last one has to come.”
It’s obvious to those who know Shoell that hanging it up is not just difficult for him; it’s unnatural. Whether officially in the capacity of being a coach or not, the Pleasant Grove product has seemingly been coaching someone, somewhere his entire life.
Before finding his way up the canyon to Heber City, Shoell traveled a journeyman’s path with stops at three different high schools and a pair of stints as a bricklayer.
“I got into coaching a little late,” Shoell explained. “Sports were my love. I absolutely loved sports, but you play and play until you can’t anymore and then real life comes. I got done with school. I was just working.”
After graduating from Pleasant Grove High School, Shoell, then a record-holding track stand out, went to Weber State University on a basketball scholarship. Shortly after his collegiate days began he joined the Army National Guard then transferred to BYU six months later. The athletically versatile Shoell decided to switch to baseball and played out his college days after serving a redshirt year.
Once he finished college, a career in masonry beckoned, and Shoell honed his skills as a bricklayer as a means to support his wife and former high school sweetheart, Shyrleen, and their six children.
Several years later, with five daughters and a son all school-aged, Shoell realized a life in coaching and giving back to the sports he played as a prep star, would be his calling.
“I loved sports,” he stated. “I played them all when I was young. Baseball, basketball, track. I held the long jump record at PG for years at 20 feet. Shoot, now I can’t even run 20 feet,” he joked.
His alma mater, Pleasant Grove High, is where he began; coaching the sophomore basketball team and assisting with track. Two years later he went to American Fork where he spent nine years working with basketball and assisting with the baseball team.
When Lone Peak High School opened, Shoell moved to the baseball staff there in 1998 and spent two years.
Still a licensed mason, he left the coaching ranks on a whim and went back to bricklaying. Yet the former coach found he missed being among students and especially young ball players.
“I made a decision at the time to try and do something strictly for the money,” Shoell explained. “And that rarely works out when your heart isn’t in it. I was getting talked into it basically, because I had the background and whatever, and I left Lone Peak to go back into masonry fulltime.”
As Shoell remembers it didn’t take long for him to realize that he had made a mistake.
“I told my wife ‘I want to get back into teaching — I don’t care where or how, but I want to go back,’” he said. “As always, she backed me a 100 percent.”
Shoell reached out to everyone he knew from his previous 13 years in the Utah coaching ranks. He called former colleagues, old ball coaches and administrators who were working their own way up the education ranks.
That’s when he found out what a strong bond he had in that community.
“I was told of an opening at Wasatch,” Shoell recalled. “I got excited about that because I had some family history up here and thought how crazy that would be if I got the chance to go.”
“School had already started and I was thinking about it being for the next year,” he added. “I remember listening to the Wasatch-Tooele state football game on the radio and rooting for Wasatch. It was like a sign I guess, because right after that, they called.”
Shoell was made a driver’s education instructor and put on the boy’s basketball team as an assistant coach along with being added to the baseball staff.
One year later, the former bricklayer, who thought he had doomed his career in coaching, was named the head coach of the Wasps. “It all seemed to just keep falling into place,” he mused.
Shoell found early success as the leader of the Wasps baseball program although it didn’t come easy. He recalled the days when he and his assistant coach, Clint Kelley, had to stand in the hallways and ask boys to come out for baseball.
The Wasps became regulars in 3A postseason baseball and advanced deep in the playoffs finishing 4th in the state in 2004 and 3rd in 2005 and 2006. In 2004 Wasatch ran off an incredible 19-game winning streak fielding a team of mostly sophomores.
“Those were special years then,” he recalled. “We built a program and boys wanted to play. We became a winner. We moved from a crummy little dirt field to a nice park facility and eventually to our own field here at the new school.”
Last week, Wasatch concluded its 2016 campaign, missing the playoffs and posting a disappointing 4-8 Region 8 record. The Wasps had a dismal start to the season losing 12 straight games before fighting back and winning four of its last eight nosing into a tiebreaker for the final postseason birth out of the region.
The Wasps won the first game, 9-7, over Uintah, but were disposed of for good by Spanish Fork in the next game, 7-0.
Not the way the long-time manager wanted to go out, but the effort down the stretch by his boys was vintage Shoell — optimistic, proud and giving it their all until the end.
Now that the season is over and that moment to say goodbye has arrived, the 29-year coaching veteran is taking inventory of his career.
“The wins and losses come and go,” he said. “But it’s the relationships that stay with you. That’s the thing I’ll miss the most. The relationships with all the boys.”
“It’s surreal,” he said. “I’m kind of numb. It’s hard to believe I won’t be doing this next year. I’m sure when the time to get the season started comes around next year, it will be even more surreal.”
Kenny Bristow is the sports editor and staff sports writer for the Wasatch Wave and contributes to the Deseret News high school coverage for the Wasatch region. Email: kennywbristow@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.