Local and state coaching legend Bill Dod will be inducted into the Sports Legends of Holman Hall of Fame on July 4. (Telegraph file photo by TOM KING)

NASHUA – Legends will truly be honored/remembered on July 4 at Holman Stadium.

The Nashua Lions Club has announced that the late former Nashua High School baseball coach Charlie Mellen, former longtime Bishop Guertin, Souhegan and Milford baseball coach Bill Dod, plus former Bishop Guertin standout football coach and athlete Tony Johnson will be inducted into their Sports Legends of Holman Hall of Fame this summer.

Dod, of course, is the winningest high school baseball coach in New Hampshire history, with 549 victories. He took a team to the NHIAA baseball tournament 43 times, and won titles at Bishop Guertin in 1982 and in 1987, and two at Souhegan in 2003 and 2016. His coaching career began at Sanborn High School, and he coached for 50 years, retiring in 2018. He was also the athletic director at Bishop Guertin for 12 years, then Milford, and then was the original AD at Souhegan when it opened in the mid 1990s. The field at Souhegan is named after him as the Bill Dod Family Field.

Mellen, who passed away this past winter at his home in Bradenton, Fla., guided the one Nashua High to state titles in 1976, 1979, 1991, 1993 and 1994. He was inducted later in ’94 into the Nashua Athletics Hall of Fame after he had retired as the Panthers coach.

His final game as Nashua coach the Panthers entered the tourney with a .500 record and made it all the way through, then upsetting over a heavily favored Concord team.

Johnson was an outstanding football player at Bishop Guertin in the late 1970s, but is most remembered lately as the coaching architect of the BG football dynasty of the early 2000s, winning six Division II titles in 10 championship game appearances. He took over a floundering BG program in 1994 and in three years had the Cardinals in the Division II championship game. At one point, his Cardinal teams won six titles in seven years, interrupted only by a late 14-13 loss to Exeter in the 2007 title game.

Johnson’s last couple of titles were won with him also serving as the BG athletic director, However, he resigned from the football job in 2011 to focus on the AD job. But missing coaching, he left Guertin after a year out of the game and was a head coach at Worcester Academy for eight years before a brief stint as football coach/AD at Bishop Brady in Concord. Johnson has returned under the BG umbrella, working as consultant/fundraiser for the schools proposed new athletic complex off of Route 111.