Dan Liedtke cuts down a net after leading the Fort Frye girls basketball team to a district championship in 2024. Liedtke has been hired as the head coach of the Shenandoah boys basketball team. (File Photo)

SARAHSVILLE — Not long after accepting the position of athletic director at Shenandoah High School, former Fort Frye baseball coach Trey Engle found out he was going to need to fill the position of head basketball coach.

Immediately, Engle had one candidate in mind in former Fort Frye girls and boys head coach Dan Liedtke, but he wasn’t confident the Hall of Fame coach would have an interest in the position.

Engle went ahead and made the call and the rest, as they say, is history. Liedtke agreed to take the position in May, one year removed from a Fort Frye coaching career that spanned nearly four decades.

“As soon as I was told we needed a head coach I reached out to him (Liedtke),” said Engle, who played basketball for Liedtke at Fort Frye as did his two brothers Tyler and Tate. “I talked to him and talked him into coming to the campus for a visit and we had a good talk and he seemed excited. It finally came together and it was just kind of like a perfect storm.”

Liedtke coached the boys program for 27 years, then coached both the boys and girls programs for three seasons before coaching just the girls teams his final 12 years at Fort Frye. Engle didn’t know if Liedtke would be open to returning to coach the boys team.

“I didn’t know if he would be interested in coaching the boys again but he was open to it right away,” said Engle. “He seemed excited and it wasn’t as hard to convince him to do it as I thought it might be.”

After piling up an incredible 759 wins in his career at Fort Frye, Liedtke did not coach last season for the first time in 39 years.

“Last year was odd not coaching but I did get to spend a lot of time with my grandkids and got to help out with them,” said Liedtke. “I still had an itch and I still feel like I can coach this game and even though I knew I didn’t have to come back and I could have sat this one out, I felt like if I did want to get back into it I needed to now.”

Liedtke was inducted into the District 12 Hall of Fame in early April and made it clear at that time he was not retired and was open to entertaining offers for a fresh start with a new school.

After turning down several offers, Liedtke got the call from Engle that immediately perked his interest more than any of the other offers he had received.

The trip to Sarahsville and a tour of the updated facilities at Shenandoah made a great impression on Liedtke and he began to seriously consider the opportunity.

“I gave the other opportunities time but I turned them down and never went to any school or anything and then Trey (Engle) called and persuaded me to come over here and check things out,” said Liedtke. “It was a great visit and, after I left, that is when I really started thinking about getting back into it and coming over here.”

Before he would totally commit to the job, Liedtke wanted to make sure he would have some quality help. He reached out to his former assistant and player, Rod “Boo” Strahler, and Engle’s father, Todd Engle, an assistant basketball coach at Belpre as well as a four-time state championship baseball coach for the Beverly/Lowell American Legion team, to see if they would have interest in joining him in his new venture.

When both Strahler and Engle agreed to be on his staff, Liedtke agreed to take the position and thus begin a brand new chapter in his legendary career.

“The other key for me was who could I get for a staff and I knew I would have to have coaches who are pretty familiar with my program,” said Liedtke. “Getting both Todd Engle and Rod Strahler to come too was a big plus.”

After being in charge of such a successful program that he began way back in 1985 at Fort Frye, the opportunity to once again build a program from the ground up was appealing to Liedtke.

“I had a lot of different opportunities and some of them were pretty good situations, but I didn’t take them because I really wanted to go somewhere where I could build a program from the very bottom,” said Liedtke. “At Fort Frye, after we got the program established, it just kind of ran itself. I always kind of had it in the back of my mind that I would like to build a program again and this will be starting from scratch.”

Liedtke realizes it won’t be an easy task as the Zeps will be very young this season and are coming off of a 2025-2026 season where they went 4-20.

“It’s really hard to come in and build a program up from scratch but I look at it as a challenge,” said Liedtke. “It’s going to take time and there is no magic wand. It’s going to take a lot of hard work by the coaches and especially the players.”

Liedtke’s teams have always been disciplined basketball teams that play defense first and that is something that can’t be taught over night.

“It can be frustrating when you are expecting players to know certain things a certain way but they only know what they did before,” said Liedtke. “It’s kind of frustrating for them too and you just have to find a way to meet in the middle till we get it all together.”

Getting a bit of a late start is also something that Liedtke and his staff will be dealing with as they try to learn personnel between now and November.

Rob Wukelich was the Zeps junior varsity coach last season and will return to the same role this season.

“Rob (Wukelich) is very familiar with the players and that really helps out a lot,” said Liedtke. “I still don’t know a lot of their names this early and that will come but having Rob here is very valuable to us.”

Trey Engle is excited that things worked out the way they did.

“It means everything to have someone that has so much respect who likes to win and respects anyone else who wants to win too,” said Engle. “He is not only a great leader, he’s a great creator of young men and I’m excited that our kids will get to learn from him.”

After spending the past 39 years wearing the red, white and blue of Fort Frye, wearing the green and white of Shenandoah will be quite a change come November for Liedtke and his staff.

“It will be different for sure but I am not choosing a team I want to go to by their colors,” said Liedtke, whose arch-rival Waterford wear the green and white. “I just look at the school and the feeling I got so I can wear forest green.”