John Lowery, Jr. named head baseball coach at Mercersburg Academy

John Lowery, Jr., who spent seven years as Martinsburg High School’s head baseball coach and led the Bulldogs to the 2009 West Virginia Class AAA state title, has been named head coach at Mercersburg Academy in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.
Lowery spent 2015 as an assistant for Mercersburg’s Mid-Atlantic Prep League-champion varsity baseball team under the legendary Karl Reisner, who has retired after 44 years on the Mercersburg faculty and 24 years as head baseball coach.
“To be able to follow Coach Reisner and to be part of the tradition Mercersburg has built here is really attractive to me as a coach,” Lowery said. “Mercersburg has always had good players and we have a lot
of great things there to appeal to those kinds of players.”
Lowery is a true baseball lifer who has won high-school state championships as a player and a head coach and has played and/or coached college, professional and summer-league baseball. He was the 1988 West Virginia Gatorade Player of the Year; the same year, he won a state title on a Jefferson High School team coached by his father, John Lowery, Sr., who has coached at Jefferson for 45 years. The senior Lowery has more than 1,200 career victories as a head coach and is a member of the National
High School Sports Hall of Fame. (Jefferson won its 11th state title under the elder Lowery earlier this month.)
“John brings an impressive background to this position, but more importantly he brings a love of the game and he cares about his players,” said Rick Hendrickson, Mercersburg’s director of athletics.
“He’s familiar with the strong tradition of success that Mercersburg baseball has fostered and he’s committed to continuing that success in all the right ways.”
Under Reisner, Mercersburg teams won 16 conference championships (including at least a share of each of the last five MAPL crowns) and four Pennsylvania Independent Schools Athletic Association state titles.
Lowery’s son, Beau, was a big part of the Blue Storm’s success in 2015 as a left-handed pitcher and infielder. The younger Lowery earned eight victories on the mound as a freshman for the Blue Storm, which won the MAPL and the Independent-Parochial School League and finished the year
with a 196 mark.
Lowery coached baseball at Martinsburg from 2005 to 2011 and also spent the 2013 season as the school’s head softball coach. His 2009 Martinsburg baseball squad went 345, which set the school record for wins in a season.
A native of Shepherdstown, Lowery graduated from the University of Minnesota, where he played with six future major leaguers (including pitcher Denny Neagle and catcher Dan Wilson). He played one season in the San Francisco Giants’ minor-league system and has been an assistant coach at the University of Michigan, Ball State University (where he coached Bryan Bullington, the No. 1 pick in the 2002 Major League Baseball Draft), and Ohio University. Lowery spent three summers as head coach and general manager of the Winchester [Virginia] Royals, a summer collegiate-league team.
Lowery and his wife, Tricia, have three children; daughter Abbee and sons Beau and Brooks. He will continue his duties as a special-education teacher at Jefferson High School, and also serves as a baseball consultant for ProScoutSports LLC.
Mercersburg Academy is a coeducational, independent college preparatory boarding and day school with students in grades 912 and a postgraduate year. In 2014-2015, Mercersburg had approximately 435 students from 30 states and 40 nations. Its alumni include Academy Award winner Jimmy Stewart, NBC Sports anchor Rebecca Lowe, and New York Mets pitcher Josh Edgin (who Lowery coached in Winchester).
For more information about the school, visit www.mercersburg.edu.