Faculty Spotlight: New Mountain View Softball Head Coach Shawn Herring

Mountain View has hired Shawn Herring as the new softball coach for the upcoming 2023 season. Herring grew up in Blanding, Utah and started playing baseball at a really young age. “I started playing baseball, like most kids, when I was 5 or 6, just your typical little league stuff,” Coach Herring said. “Then as I got older I played for some advanced travel teams and a couple amateur leagues throughout Colorado and New Mexico. I really wasn’t very good until I was 12 or so, and didn’t even start picching until I was 14 and realized nobody could hit off of me!”

Herring’s baseball career has been, “full of ups and downs! A lot more failures than success, but those failures set me up to succeed in more important aspects of life,” Coach Herring said. “After playing high school baseball, and winning a State championship and several individual awards, I went and played at some of the highest levels of amateur baseball and for Team USA at one point. I could throw between 96-98 on a good day, with an unhittable slider that took me pretty far until injuries set it. I moved at one point to second base and lasted a year in one of my final attempts at playing professionally. I played for several teams in a few different professional leagues and after battling through injuries and setbacks, decided enough was enough!”

Since his playing days, Herring has been involved in training and coaching players over the years. When Mountain View needed to hire a new head coach for girls softball, Shawn took the opportunity to coach. Herring said, “I’ve always loved coaching youth sports. I coached a little league many years ago when I was in college and helped coach a high school in Phoenix while living down there. I’ve coached a lot of athletes 1 on 1 since moving to Utah, but never got into coaching a team until now. I’ve actually never watched or coached softball until my daughter and some friends asked me to coach their rec team in the summer of 2022! And I’ve never had so much fun in my life. The skillset, although similar to baseball, has to be so much more precise and quick and I fell back in love with coaching. I’m in a position in life that I’m grateful for any opportunity to give back to the community, and this seemed to be a natural transition for me. And after about 6 weeks of meeting and working with the other players and coaching, I know more than ever that it was the right choice.”

Herring has high goals for the upcoming season. “Win! We have to set our goals high, and winning a state championship will always be our goal entering every season,” Coach Herring said. “But that’s not our only goal. We want to have fun, we want to hopefully be extremely competitive while doing so, but we definitely want to have fun! We want to be better, not only as athletes, but as students and in life. Someone told me years ago that trophies collect dust, but memories last forever! These girls have 4 years in high school before moving on and I’m lucky enough that I get to be a very small part of their lives, and help mold them not only into good athletes, but more importantly good people!”