PJ Fleck always has something to say.
The University of Minnesota football coach is a fiery motivator equipped with acronyms and analogies, metaphors and mantras, for any situation. He’s known for his intensity. He is sometimes compared to the Energizer Bunny. He’s been seen wiping the blood from a player’s split lip across his own bald head after a recent hard-fought victory, inspiring the broadcast to declare that Fleck had “ gone insane .”
But last year, before a game against Michigan State, Fleck found himself facing a situation far bigger than football. He told his wife he had never felt more pressure to win. For the first time, maybe ever, Fleck worried intently about what to say.
“If there’s one time in my life that I didn’t want to say the wrong thing,” Fleck told CNN Sports of the moment. “I’ve said a lot of wrong things after games. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.”
It’s a fear that stops so many people from saying anything, especially when nothing you could say will change a horrible reality. What can anyone say in the wake of a school shooting ?
Fleck didn’t want the luxury of staying silent, though, instead feeling an incredible sense of responsibility as a highly visible state employee and a deep well of empathy as a parent. In truth, he felt it was a calling to serve his Minneapolis community reeling from a tragedy in exactly this way.
“I just wanted him to know that we’re here for the healing process – however, and as much as, you want us,” Fleck said.
Jesse Merkel was not a University of Minnesota fan. In fact, as a college runner, he’d had a negative experience with their recruitment process and harbored a low-level grudge for a couple of decades. Plus Fleck always seemed like a bit of a showboat, especially compared to the deferential Minnesotans.
Merkel’s impression of Fleck was that the coach was “able to cram 10 minutes of words into five minutes of conversation. … A little much at times.”
But that was before. Before he knew PJ Fleck as a fellow father who had experienced unthinkable loss. Before everything changed and he learned far more deeply than anyone should ever have to what true generosity looks like because it comes in the wake of true evil. That was before Jesse Merkel’s son was killed in a school shooting at eight years old .
In August 2025, when a shooting at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis claimed the life of 8-year-old Fletcher Merkle, the University of Minnesota football team stepped in to support. But their commitment didn't stop there. A year later, head coach P.J. Fleck shares how the Gophers program continues to show up for the community creating a lifetime bond with grieving families.
“He would play tiddlywinks,” his father said. “He did football, soccer, baseball, track. But his favorite by far was football.”
The last spring of his life, Fletcher’s flag football team won the championship. One of his best friends, MJ Roaldi, was the quarterback and Fletcher was the star receiver. Fletcher was fast, notably so. He once accidentally ran an entire 5k race in 24 minutes at eight years old.
“In a lot of ways, he was my mini-me,” Jesse Merkel said. “Would have been a lot taller and probably more athletic than me.”
Fletcher was competitive, too. At flag football games now, his friends feel his absence because there’s no one meticulously keeping score in their head like Fletcher did.
“We were working on his ‘losing with grace’ skill,” Jesse said.
In October 2024, that love of football inspired Mike Roaldi, MJ’s father, and Adam Dietenberger to take Fletcher and three of his friends – MJ, Sebi Dietenberger and Trip Sharpe – to a Golden Gophers game. They had little connection to the team, but when the Gophers upset the University of Southern California, the boys stormed the field along with the rest of the fans.
“We suddenly got this picture of them on the field,” Jesse Merkel recalled. “He came home and he was just like, ‘You would never believe it! We were on the field and we’re with the players, and it was the coolest thing.’”
It was Fletcher’s favorite day, his joy about the experience infectious. It was just like him to have such unbridled enthusiasm.
For Fleck, it was “the only memory and moment that I had with Fletcher that I didn’t even know I had. You just never know who you’re impacting, and you never know how the universe and the world is going to pull you back together.”
Ten months later, Fletcher was one of two students killed, along with 27 others who were injured, at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, less than 10 miles from the University of Minnesota campus. The shooting took place while first through eighth graders were at Mass next to the school. Fletcher and 10-year-old Harper Moyski died next to their friends and classmates.
“The day after the shooting, so the day after they lost him, I was at a park where we got together and comforted each other,” Mike Roaldi said.
“There were four of Fletcher’s close friends there, and they were kind of playing tag, and then they would stop and talk. I overheard them at one point – 24 or 36 hours before Fletcher (had been) alive – and they just said something like, ‘Hey, you think he’s watching us right now?’ And then they started to talk about things that would be different without him, and it was clear how much he meant to them just in that conversation.”
Fleck spoke publicly about the shooting after the Gophers’ next game. He had already told his players that football should be the smallest thing on their minds. They should dedicate their thoughts to the community that was impacted.
“These are our kids,” he said, choking back tears at the podium .
At Fletcher’s funeral, Will Sharpe, Trip’s father who had coached Fletcher in flag football, gave the eulogy. He talked about Fletcher’s love of life and sports and football and the time he and his friends found themselves on the field after Minnesota’s dramatic victory.
Someone from the Gophers heard that and reached out to Sharpe through Facebook. Somebody gave Fleck the picture of Fletcher and his friends reveling in the uncomplicated joy that sports can offer a kid. The picture still sits on his desk.
Just knowing he had helped make a happy memory for someone who wouldn’t get nearly enough of them: “That changes your life,” Fleck said.
The first time the Annunciation community went to a Gopher game as honored guests was a couple months after the shooting. By then, the team had already sent more than 30 players to the school’s Fall Festival, where they spent hours playing wiffle ball with the students who were changed forever by two-and-a-half minutes of merciless violence.
Jesse Merkel was not looking forward to the game. It still hurt, badly, to be around Fletcher’s friends. It felt senseless and unfair. Why did it have to be his son who was gone forever? Those thoughts made him feel guilty on top of the grief.
But that day proved to be different.
The Gophers invited Fletcher’s brother and three friends – Trip, MJ and Sebi – along with the fathers to be part of their game week. They attended practice, watched Fleck give his pregame speech and sat in club seats where they included a ticket for Fletcher.
Somewhere along the way, Merkel and Fleck met for the first time.
“He told me that he lost a son himself and that immediately, for better or worse, lets me put my guard down,” Jesse Merkel said.
Colton Fleck died shortly after birth of a heart condition. His father is careful not to equate that loss to what the Fletchers and Moyskis are going through.
“Pain comes to us in a lot of different ways and a lot of different-sized waves,” Fleck said, “and I can’t imagine the tidal wave that those families are experiencing.”
But his son’s ashes are in an urn and he still chokes up talking about it.
“I know what it’s like when people say things to you and you’re like, ‘Yeah, but you have no idea , ’” Fleck said. “ And then they go about their day and you still don’t have your child. “
It allowed Jesse Merkel to trust the intentions behind what Fleck had to say, but it also allowed them to be quiet together and just hold each other. Fleck gave Merkel a charm with a saint on it.
“This is what I use to think about my son,” Fleck told him, “and I’d like you to have one.”
The specificity and intimacy caught Merkel off guard. This wasn’t perfunctory or performative. The public persona of Fleck – someone quick with an inspirational quote – that had once rubbed him the wrong way, was not a persona at all.
“That, for sure, stuck with me,” Merkel said. “I think that maybe the best word to describe PJ Fleck would be ‘genuine’ because what you see is what you get. Like it or not, it’s what you’re getting. And, when you’re able to get enough people with the right mindset together, I think that you can really do great things.”
As they had the year before when Fletcher was in the stands, the Gophers won that game in dramatic fashion – an overtime win after which, once again, the crowd stormed the field. This time, Fletcher wasn’t among them, but his friends and family were. Defensive end Anthony Smith ran over to greet the group; then Fleck did as well, and finally the quarterback Drake Lindsey.
Later, in the locker room, while wearing a Team Fletcher wristband, Fleck gave the boys each a game ball. He hugged Jesse Merkel, who closed his eyes and didn’t let go for several seconds. As MJ’s dad, Mike Roaldi, teared up, one of the players put his arm around the older man.
Then the team hoisted the four boys onto their shoulders, bouncing them into the air as they chanted the school’s fight song.
“When we came here, it was the first time that I was around them, and I was able to feed off of their joy and be happy for them,” Merkel said of seeing Fletcher’s friends relishing the experience. But that solace was bittersweet.
That was November 1, 2025. When he addressed the team in the locker room after the game, Fleck called the Annunciation community “family to us.”
“And they will always be family to us,” he said at the time, “from now [to] forever.”
And then, to very little fanfare, the Gophers made good on that sentiment. They invited Fletcher’s whole class out to a practice before last year’s bowl game. Players attended a Fishing for Fletcher fundraiser for the school. This fall, they had Fletcher’s friends and family back out for another game and then a practice during the bye week. For a costume event at school, Trip dressed as PJ Fleck.
“I’m shocked. There is no obligation. There’s really no connection to Annunciation, or (from) my family to the U of M, and they just continue to show up. They have been a pillar of strength and joy,” Merkel said. “And they’ll be here as long as we want them to be here. I truly believe that.”
Most sports teams at college and professional levels engage in charity; all purport to have a meaningful connection to the community that cheers for them. But what exists between the Gopher football team and a small group of families affected by the Annunciation Catholic school shooting goes beyond philanthropy. It’s a relationship.
It’s one that is not entered into lightly. Because as difficult as it was for Fleck, himself a father intimately acquainted with loss, to embrace the grief of the situation head on, he’s asking his young players to do so as well.
“He tells you that (when he recruits in) high school. Like, ‘Hey, you’re going to have to learn how to serve and give to people who can’t give anything to you,’” said Maverick Baranowski, a fifth-year linebacker. “If you don’t want to do that, you’re just not in the right place.”
And then it continues – relentlessly, as is Fleck’s style – once players become part of the program.
“This is why I’ve stayed here for five years – because of the people on the football team and on the staff,” Smith, the star defensive tackle said. “I think that’s the most attractive thing when it comes to this program as a whole, like, it teaches you how to be a man before you become a football player”
That education is intentional. Fleck sees his role as taking teenagers and turning them into future fathers and partners.
If that sounds trite, consider that college sports are increasingly transient and transactional in a world of transfer portals and NIL agreements. The Gophers’ commitment to prioritizing a perspective bigger than football isn’t some secret sauce to success – they’re solidly middle-of-the-pack in the Big Ten this season.
Merkel, and the other dads, seem amazed at the Gophers’ willingness and ability to continue to make themselves available for support. But Fleck said the reason for that, the key to embodying genuine empathy as a football team or a larger-than-life coach, is simple.
“You can hold other people’s pain, you can hold other people’s experiences, because you choose to do it,” he said.
For the young boys who had their childhoods shattered, and for the father whose son will never grow up, the relationship has provided a powerful counterbalance to the devastating revelation that life can be unimaginably cruel.
“I have come to understand, after Fletcher was killed, that there is so much more good in the world than I thought before,” Jesse Merkel said. “But the bad is really bad.”
