The Coconuts Are Building a Dugout. Now They Need the Coaches to Fill It.
Six open positions. Two programs. One island. The Bohol Coconuts Athletic Department has its structure in place and its Sports Director at the helm. What it needs now are the international coaches ready to build something from scratch.
When Merv Moore talks about the Bohol Coconuts Athletic Department, he does not start with statistics or scouting reports. He starts with structure. For a program building itself from the ground up on a Philippine island that most international coaches have never associated with organized baseball, structure is everything.
Moore is the Sports Director overseeing both the Coconuts Baseball Program and the Coconuts Softball Program. His job is not to manage games or attend practice sessions. His job is to build the coaching architecture that makes great games possible. That architecture is now in place. What it needs are the coaches to bring it to life.
Six positions across two programs. All of them open. All of them waiting.
One Blueprint, Two Programs
The Coconuts coaching model is straightforward by design. Two parallel programs, baseball and softball, each built on an identical three-coach structure.
The head coach trains the Junior (Ages 12-13) and Senior (Ages 14-18) divisions while directing the entire program, and two assistant coaches whose roles divide the competitive ladder cleanly between them.
In baseball, one assistant works with the Triple-A (Ages 10–11) and Double-A (Ages 8–9) divisions, while the other handles Rookie League (Ages 4–5) and Single-A (Ages 6–7).
The head coach owns the full picture and bridges both sides of that divide.
The softball program mirrors this structure exactly.
Merv Moore
Sports Director
Full Picture, Full Responsibility
The Head Baseball Coach and Head Softball Coach are the nerve centers of their respective programs. They direct practice design, player development philosophy, game-day strategy, and divisional coordination across all four competitive levels. They are responsible for what happens on both sides of the assistant split.
These are not ceremonial roles. The program is not looking for figureheads who will delegate everything and disappear into administrative work. The expectation is presence.
A head coach here must know what is happening in the Rookie League as clearly as they know what is happening in Triple-A, because both feed the same program and both reflect on the same leadership.
“We are not building a bureaucracy. We are building a coaching environment. The structure exists to give coaches clarity, not to create distance between them and the work.”
Merv Moore, Sports DirectorExperience at the upper levels of competitive play matters. But the program is equally interested in coaches who understand developmental baseball and softball from the inside out.
Building a player from their first real season through competitive advancement is the core project here.
The Developmental Divide
The two assistant positions in each program are built around a deliberate split.
One assistant coach works with Triple-A and Double-A, where competition is sharper, tactical complexity increases, and players are working toward the higher tiers of the program.
The second assistant coach works with Rookie League and Single-A, the entry points where habits are formed and the culture of the program is first introduced.
Both roles carry equal weight. The coach who gets a young player to fall in love with the game is doing work that no statistician can measure but every serious baseball person understands.
The Coconuts want coaches for these roles who understand that too.
The softball program mirrors this structure exactly and operates as a full peer to baseball within the Athletic Department, with the same resources, the same support infrastructure, and the same access to the coaching community being built around both programs.
“The best coaching happens before the scoreboard matters. If you can develop a player’s love for the game in the early years, the competitive results take care of themselves down the road.”
Merv Moore — Sports Director, Bohol CoconutsThe Coach-Trainees Are The Support Staff
Filipino coach-trainees will be present at practice sessions across both programs, working directly under international coaches from day one.
These native coaches are in development, and their presence is part of the Coconuts’ deliberate investment in local baseball and softball education.
For international coaches arriving on Bohol, this relationship is one of the program’s more distinctive features.
The trainees bring local knowledge, community relationships, and a fluency in the cultural landscape of Bohol that no incoming coach could replicate without years of residency.
International coaches bring technical frameworks, professional experience, and development methodologies that most Philippine coaches have never encountered in a live working environment.
The exchange runs in both directions.
The Whole Island Is the Scouting Territory
Before a single regular-season game is played, the Bohol Coconuts coaching staff will have already traveled the length and width of the island.
The program is planning a series of tryout camps that will reach communities across all of Bohol — a province spanning dozens of municipalities whose collective athletic talent has never been formally evaluated by anyone in international baseball.
The camps are the pipeline. The Coconuts All-Star Program is the destination.
Top prospects identified through the island-wide camps, kids with high upside who might otherwise never find a path into organized ball, will be evaluated for enrollment in the club’s elite training system.
The Coconuts All-Star Program is where the best developmental coaching environment will be waiting for them.
The format is deliberate. Each camp will be conducted by international coaches working alongside Filipino coach-trainees who know the community and speak the language.
Our coach-trainees can help a teenager from a barangay that has never seen organized baseball understand what is being asked of them, and why it matters.
These are not auditions designed to weed people out. They are designed as invitations.
“Bohol has athletic talent that nobody in international baseball has evaluated yet. That changes the moment our coaches set foot in these communities. What they find out there is going to surprise people.”
Merv Moore — Sports Director, Bohol CoconutsThe coaching staff responsible for conducting those camps is, of course, the same staff the program is currently recruiting.
The coaches who accept positions with the Coconuts are not inheriting a finished talent pool. They are going out into the island and finding it themselves.
For a certain kind of coach, that is the most appealing sentence in this entire article.
Where Coaches Actually Live
Any coach seriously considering a role with the Coconuts will eventually ask the same practical question: what does this actually look like day to day?
The Coconuts offer two housing options, and they reflect meaningfully different levels of commitment to the program.
What This Program Is Actually For
The Coconuts are not simply filling positions. They are assembling the founding coaching staff of a program that does not yet have a history, which means the coaches who arrive first will have a disproportionate hand in creating it.
The divisional structure gives coaches defined territories and clear accountability. The coach-trainee program gives international coaches a local partner whose investment in the program’s success is genuine.
The location gives the coaching staff something that programs in larger, more established markets almost never offer: a quiet island where the work is the work, and the noise that typically surrounds professional sport is largely absent.
Some coaches need the proximity to league politics and media attention to feel like they are doing real work.
However, the Coconuts are not built for those coaches. They are built for the ones who would rather spend their energy on the field. Those coaches know who they are.
“We are going to travel this entire island looking for players. Every municipality, every barangay. The coach who joins us for that journey is going to come away changed. You cannot do that work and see what we are going to see and walk away the same coach you were when you arrived.”
Merv Moore — Sports Director, Bohol CoconutsThe Six Founding Coaches Will Share in What They Build
Most coaching contracts pay a salary and stop there. The Bohol Coconuts are structured differently.
The six founding coaches — the first three hired for baseball, the first three hired for softball — will each receive a five percent share of the net profit generated by the “Building the Coconuts” YouTube docuseries.
Six coaches. Five percent each. Thirty percent of the series’ net profit distributed among the people whose daily work is the show’s entire reason for existing.
This is not a bonus structure with fine print and performance thresholds. It is a revenue-sharing agreement tied directly to the success of a content series that the coaches themselves will be starring in, whether they think of it that way or not.
Every tryout camp they run across Bohol, every practice session they lead, every young player they develop from raw prospect to competitive athlete — that is the content.
That is what the audience will watch. And as the audience grows, so does the income flowing back to the coaches who made it worth watching.
The math matters here, and it is worth thinking through clearly.
The docuseries milestone that triggers free housing for the Coaches House — 25,000 viewers per episode — is also the threshold at which the revenue-sharing agreement begins to generate meaningful passive income.
A coaching staff that is engaged, visible, and genuinely invested in the program’s story will accelerate that growth faster than any marketing campaign.
The coaches have both the most direct influence over the show’s quality and the most direct financial incentive to care about it.
For a coach who owns an Eco-Lodge Suite, the picture compounds further.
Suite booking revenue — forty percent of every guest stay — sits on top of the docuseries share, not in place of it.
The founding coaches who invest at that level are building something closer to a portfolio than a paycheck.
Besides a coaching role, there is a media stake and a real estate income stream, all on one island, all growing from the same program they are already committed to building.
The Coconuts are offering the founding six something that does not come with most coaching jobs anywhere in the world: a genuine ownership stake in the upside of what they build.
When the program succeeds, the coaches share in that success. That alignment is not accidental. It is the point.
