Pete Iussig promised he wouldn’t change his mind again.

“Nobody’s going to talk me out of it this time,” he said.

Crown Point announced Tuesday the 63-year-old Iussig was retiring as the school’s softball coach, just three years after he came out of retirement to head the program.

In three seasons at Crown Point, the 2011 Indiana Softball Hall of Fame inductee went 84-13 while guiding the Bulldogs to the 2017 state championship.

Before taking over at Crown Point, Iussig coached at Lowell for 25 years, posting a 440-280-1 record while reaching the state semifinals twice.

Iussig stepped down in 2015, describing the likelihood of his return as “never in a million years.”

However, Iussig was adamant about how this retirement was going to be permanent.

“I’m 63, so I’m getting up there,” he said. “When you put in all the coaching and teaching together, it’s been about 40 years. That’s a long time. I just think I’m ready to hang it up and start playing golf.”

Iussig said he started considering the move near the end of the 2019 season as all of the responsibilities associated with coaching a high school softball team became unwieldy.

“There’s a whole lot that goes into it that sometimes people don’t see — a whole lot,” Iussig said. “It’s becoming overwhelming in terms of decision-making.”

And another unseasonably cold and damp softball season didn’t help.

“The spring weather really takes it out of you,” he said. “This was may be the coldest, wettest one of all of them. It was terrible.”

But Crown Point athletic director Bill Dorulla said no one was better at steering a program than Iussig.

“All the phases of coaching, he does them well,” Dorulla said. “It’s hard to find coaches that have all of that. We were lucky to get a coach of his caliber to come in and take this program to the next level.”

Along with spending time on the golf course, Iussig said he also wanted to pursue his other passion — authoring children’s books.

He has already published four, including the baseball-themed “King of the Hill.” Iussig said he has a fifth book written that’s awaiting its illustrator.

Iussig graduated from Merrillville in 1973. Along with his storied coaching career, he was a middle school teacher for 38 years.

As he steps down from coaching for the final time, Iussig said he will miss the same things as a coach that he did as a teacher.

“There’s a lot of other things lately with being a teacher and it’s the same thing with coaching,” Iussig said. “All of that other stuff, I won’t miss. But I’ll miss the kids.”