Billy Mohl's Mission Turns Pain Into Perspective

When Creighton baseball assistant and pitching coach Billy Mohl walks out of the diamond every day, he isn't exactly heading for a quiet evening of reflection. Trading a roster of collegiate baseball players after practice for the chaos of his own living room, Mohl finds that the energy at home is more akin to an at-home WWE match.

"If you've ever watched the WWE's Royal Rumble, that's what my house is like," Mohl said. "Brock is a kid that will jump off the top rope — he's the youngest. He's the one that keeps everybody on their toes. He's the fireplug of the family."

The Mohl home is defined by the constant motion of four sons. There's Mason, the oldest, readying to head to college with dreams of becoming a pilot; Grant, a soon-to-be high school senior and football player; Hunter, a freshman at Elkhorn High and the only one with the baseball bug; and Brock, a fellow football fanatic and the youngest of the bunch.

At the center of the whirlwind of motion is Mohl's wife, Krista. The anchor of the family, she runs the household while Mohl takes care of his athletes on the field.

"She's Mom of the Year," Mohl said. "Obviously, I'm in charge of 37 other kids, and she bears the brunt of most of it [at home]."

A quiet moment may be a rare commodity, but for Mohl, "life is as good as it can be."

That perspective is hard-earned, as Mohl is the first to say that these peaks in life don't come without the valleys.

Long before he found this version of 'the good life' in Nebraska, early signs of struggle emerged in the Illinois State dugout.

While working as the pitching coach for Illinois State, Mohl got news that Rick Jones — the Tulane baseball head coach whom Mohl played under during college and worked for years later — was navigating his nephew Chase Jones's diagnosis with stage IV brain cancer. Chase was a freshman at the University of North Carolina, and he and Mohl were close, having worked camps together in the summers.

"I remember when I got the news that fall [2006], I was devastated because that was the first person that I was fairly close to that had cancer, and that young," Mohl remembered.

Chase's personal battle soon transformed into a public crusade against the disease. Upon beating his diagnosis in 2013, Chase began the Vs. Cancer Foundation, an organization that uses sports-centered fundraising to support pediatric cancer research and aid patients and families during their treatment. When Mohl was asked to join the organization that year, he said it was an easy yes.

"The money is going to pediatrics because these kids, they're five, six, seven, eight years old, they've got a whole life in front of them. That's where the passion is, and the success stories are great," Mohl explained. "It will be great to get to a point where there are more of those success stories and less of having to bury somebody way too early."

At the time, Mohl's passion for bringing baseball together with cancer awareness for the Vs. Cancer Foundation was driven by his relationship with the Jones family. That same year, however, Mohl would begin fighting the same battle under his own roof.

In 2012, Mohl's first wife, Sarah, was diagnosed with a rare form of cervical cancer. By the time the 2013 Illinois State baseball season was underway, it became clear that the disease was advancing rapidly.

It was then that Mohl stepped away from the dugout to be where he was needed most: supporting his wife and taking care of their two-year-old son, Hunter. In his late 20's, Mohl always thought that the time ahead, with his wife and their young son, would be limitless. Instead, he was navigating a nightmare that nothing could have prepared him for.

"I was 28 years old, dealing with a wife with cancer," Mohl said. "You have your whole dream set up ahead of you in terms of what you think life's going to be like."

The world, it seemed, had other plans. On March 25, 2013, Sarah passed away after a seven-month battle with cancer. But she didn't leave Mohl alone. He had a living reminder of the life that he and Sarah had built together.

"The best gift I got from Sarah was my son Hunter," Mohl said. "That's the last piece of her that I got. That's the best gift she gave me."

If Hunter gave Mohl a reason to keep fighting, the commitment he made to Sarah helped give him a larger purpose.

"I promised Sarah right before she died that I would continue supporting Vs. Cancer and awareness," Mohl said. "I'm not one to break promises, so I feel like that is my motivator, in honoring her name and doing what I told her I would do. It's the mission to just save that one family and do what I promised her."

Just as Mohl had taken care of Sarah off the field, she soon found a way of taking care of him while on it.

"It was special," Mohl said while tearing up. "When she died, I think I missed two weeks. I think it's the only two weeks I've ever missed in terms of baseball or work, period. And then when I got back, we [Illinois State] went on a tear."

The Redbirds won 24 of their next 28 games that season, turning the tragedy into a baseball triumph when Illinois State won the Missouri Valley Conference title outright for the first time in school history. For Mohl, the culmination of that season wasn't luck or coincidence. It was Sarah.

"I remember it was 2013, and we're playing Southern Illinois down at Southern Illinois, and Coach Kingston gets ejected for arguing," Mohl reminisced. "If we won that game, we won the conference outright, and, sure as heck, we won it. I got the water bath for the first time, and there was sunshine, all that. Coolest moment of my life — obviously tragedy — but I'll remember that forever. That was Sarah saying she was alright."

Achieving a piece of Illinois State baseball history wasn't the only way that Sarah supported Billy the year she passed. She also helped him find his second wife, Krista.

The two met in 2013, and Mohl swears to this day that Sarah was the one who brought Krista into his life.

"I truly believe, and I've told Krista this a million times, when Sarah passed, I swear to God she said, 'Oh boy, he can't do this stuff on his own,' and boom, there Krista was," Mohl said.

Mohl and Krista got married in 2015, building a young, blended family of boys: Mohl's son Hunter, and Krista's sons Mason and Grant. Their family was soon completed after the birth of their youngest son, Brock.

As Mohl continued to navigate the changes to so much of his original life plan, Krista was there to steady him at every turn.

"Not being alone at that time [after Sarah passed] was huge. Krista filled the void I had at the time," Mohl said. "She was very understanding and very respectful of what had happened. She gave me that peace when I needed it."

Baseball also proved a pillar for peace, aiding in the other half of Mohl's healing.

"Baseball was my escape. There were two things in my life: my family and baseball. So, I still had baseball to go to," Mohl noted. "My time at the field was the time where I didn't have to think about all the bad stuff that was going on. It was my release. That's what the game is for me."

The support of sport and family gave Mohl the strength to move forward, but time didn't erase the impact that cancer had made on his life. Instead, the passing years served as constant reminders of why he made his initial promise. What began as a personal tribute to Chase Jones, Vs. Cancer and his late first wife, Sarah, turned into a career-long crusade in every program he has been a part of.

"The beautiful thing about sports is that you've got the platform to help make a difference in other people's lives, and you want to take advantage," Mohl said.

Before joining the Creighton baseball staff and after his tenure at Illinois State, Mohl, Krista and the family uprooted to Tampa, Fla., where the Vs. Cancer dream continued to thrive from 2015 to 2021 at the University of South Florida.

There, Mohl found a reality where cancer continued to hold a heavy presence in his own life and the lives of the players.

"This is one fight that's just not going away. Since 2013, I've lost my grandmother to it, I've lost my father-in-law to it and I've lost some really good friends, like Alexis Buchman, who was a softball player at USF, who I was really close with," Mohl said. "It's not just me. When is it going to stop, and when's the research going to catch up? We've got an answer for pretty much every disease except this one."

Among those lost was Krista's father, who passed from cancer shortly after the Mohl family moved to Omaha in 2024 and Mohl took a coaching position at Creighton.

"When we moved, Krista's dad was battling cancer, so it's kind of one of those full-circle moments where God put you where you needed to be, and we were here in Omaha. Unfortunately, he passed two falls ago, when we first moved here, so you always wonder if the big man upstairs was working in mysterious ways getting you here," Mohl recalled.

While his arrival in Omaha was shadowed by another loss, it also offered a new journey for Mohl to fulfill his promise to Sarah — honoring her, his father-in-law and all those he's lost — in a city that uniquely understands the unifying power of cancer awareness in sports.

The established impact of the former head men's basketball coach Greg McDermott's 'Pink Out' game set the stage for the inaugural 'Cancer Awareness' baseball game on April 19, 2025. On that day, players shaved their heads, and 1,442 members of the Omaha community held up signs commemorating those who were battling or had lost their lives to cancer.

"The turnout was awesome," revealed Mohl. "It was more than I expected, and I'm hoping this year is even bigger, but it's just such a small show of support for the millions of those battling that ugly disease. You can go down our roster and ask our guys if they've been affected by anybody that they know who's got cancer, and most of them will say yes. The game just has a deep meaning. It's something that makes a simple gesture of shaving our heads, an easy thing to do."

The perspective gained in the dugout at the cancer awareness game is only half the story for Mohl. It's those moments after those nine innings, when the Creighton baseball players get to go to the hospital and see the results of their fundraising and support, that he thinks are the most important.

"This is helping spread a mission," said Mohl. "When the players go in and see those kids at Nebraska Children's Center. They realize that some of the money that they've raised is going to that, I want them to understand the impact that they can have."

That impact works both ways. While the children receive support, the Bluejays gain a profound sense of perspective.

"I want them to understand the appreciation of what they have and what they get to do because some of those that are battling this disease aren't that fortunate," Mohl pointed out. "It's been 13 years now [since Sarah passed], and the amount of people that have been impacted by cancer … I just want [the players] to understand that there's a lot more to life than a game and that this is a way of giving back to others."

Mohl's experiences have not only served as the foundation of his teachings, but also shaped his own understanding of life.

"Tragedy usually turns into — if you use it right — something positive. The bump in the road was a tough bump to go over, but you know what? It's got me a healthy family living in Omaha, Nebraska, playing in Charles Schwab Field, and an athletic department full of great people," Mohl concluded.

Now, 13 years later, Mohl continues to serve as the architect of this mission against cancer, and his work has evolved from a personal promise into a collective family tradition.

"Krista obviously lost her dad to cancer, so she's more invested. Hunter was too young to remember his mom passing away, but he shaves his head every year with me," said Mohl. "The cancer awareness game is always a big day. It's not as emotional for them as it is for me, but they're very supportive and they've shown up to the event every time."

Mohl's life mission and resilience define everything that happened after that day in March of 2013, serving as proof that when life takes, it also gives back in incredible ways.

"The thing I found most is perspective. Anything in life, any tragedy you go through, if you can find perspective in it, I think that's a win. Life's not always a straight arrow going up. It has its peaks and valleys, and if you can get perspective out of the valleys, the peaks can become that much higher."

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