Moore or Less • Sports Editorial
Why the Coconuts Media Machine Is Part of the Mission
By Merv Moore • Sports & Media Director, Bohol Coconuts • May 2026
I was 24 years old when I started The Seagoville Gazette weekly newspaper to go head-to-head against a publication owned by the city mayor.
Nobody told me to do it. Nobody funded it. Nobody handed me a roadmap and said, here, this is how you challenge a powerful incumbent with a printing press and a chip on your shoulder.
I just knew the full story about my hometown local government wasn’t being told. And I knew someone had to tell it.
That instinct never left me. It followed me from college newsrooms to baseball diamonds, from North America to Europe to Asia. It is the same instinct that brought me to Bohol Island, and it is the same instinct that convinced me, from the very beginning, that building an elite baseball and softball academy without a media operation behind it would be like building a house with no foundation.
You might get the walls up. But it won’t stand.
The Question Nobody Asks
When people learn about the Bohol Coconuts, they ask about the kids. They ask about the facilities. They ask about the coaches and the curriculum and where we will find the funding.
Nobody asks about the media network.
And that tells me everything I need to know. Because the media machine is not a marketing afterthought. It is not a newsletter we send out when we have good news to share. It is not a social media account that posts highlight clips of pretty swings and diving catches.
It is the engine. And without it, none of this works the way it needs to work.
Think about what we are actually attempting here. We are a brand-new organization with no history, no trophy case, and no famous alumni. We are building a baseball and softball academy on a Philippine island that is not remotely on the radar of the global sports community.
We are asking families from low-income communities to trust us with their children. We are asking sponsors, partners, and supporters from around the world to invest in something they cannot yet see.
Without a media machine telling that story in real time, that ask is nearly impossible. With one, it becomes something else entirely.
Four Websites. One YouTube Docuseries. Six Social Channels.
The Coconuts Media Network is not one thing. It is a coordinated publishing operation designed to reach different audiences with different needs, different questions, and different reasons to care about what is happening on Bohol Island.
The flagship site at bohol-coconuts.com is the newsroom. Club updates, editorial columns, and local news. It gives the world a front-row seat to what elite youth baseball and softball development looks like when it starts from zero.
The Founders Club is a platform to recruit a collective of visionaries who will drive the future of elite teenage baseball and softball prospects on Bohol Island. These founders support the mission by purchasing an Eco-Lodge Suite on a tropical island paradise, and earn revenue every time a guest rents their suite. These bookings also help fund the club’s programs.
The Move2Bohol site speaks directly to expats, retirees, and international folks considering a life on this island. Baseball is not the only story we are telling. The community around it matters just as much.
And Building the Coconuts is exactly what it sounds like. A behind-the-scenes chronicle of building something that has never been done before in this part of the world. The challenges. The setbacks. The breakthroughs.
That fourth site feeds directly into the YouTube Docuseries. Not a polished promotional video. A real, unscripted series about what it actually takes to build something from nothing in a remote location with limited resources and unlimited ambition.
Six social media channels activate the moment the club launches operations next month. Each one with a specific purpose. Each one feeding the larger story back into the network.
This is not an accident. This is architecture.
Why Most Grassroots Programs Stay Small
I have watched numerous grassroots sports programs launch with genuine passion and good intentions, only to plateau inside of five years.
The pattern is almost always the same. Founders with a vision. A group of motivated kids. A small, loyal local audience. And then a wall. Because nobody outside their immediate community knows they exist.
They spend years waiting for discovery instead of engineering it. They hold fundraiser after fundraiser. They apply for grants and submit proposals and wait for someone in a position of power to notice what they have built.
Some get lucky. Most don’t.
The Coconuts are not doing that. We are not waiting to be discovered. We are going to tell our story loudly, consistently, and compellingly, from Day One, to a worldwide audience that we have the tools to reach right now.
That is a fundamental difference in approach. And I believe it is the difference between an organization that transforms a few lives and one that transforms a generation.
“We are not waiting to be discovered. We are going to tell our story loudly, consistently, and compellingly, from Day One, to a worldwide audience we already have the tools to reach.”
— Merv Moore, Sports & Media Director
The Kids Are the Story
Let me be honest about something.
The Coconuts Media Network is not here to talk about the organization. It is not here to talk about facilities, sponsors, or coaches. Those things matter, but they are not the story.
The story is a 12-year-old kid from a barangay in Bohol who has never held a baseball bat in her life, who walks onto our field for the first time and discovers something inside herself that nobody told her was there.
The story is the look on a father’s face when his son throws a ball with real mechanics for the first time. The story is the phone call a teenager makes to his family the day he learns he has been accepted to a college program he never thought was within reach.
Those are the moments that move people. Those are the moments that turn a casual supporter into a committed one, that turn a curious reader into a Founders Club member, that turn a skeptic into a believer.
Our media machine will capture every single one of them.
A kid grinding through a training session in 95-degree heat, with no air conditioning, on a field still being shaped out of raw land. That kid deserves to have the world know her name.
We Are Not a Charity
I want to say this “chrystal” clear, because it matters.
The Bohol Coconuts are not a charity. We are not asking kids to feel grateful for being included. We are not handing out participation trophies and calling it development.
We are going to ask these kids to be accountable. To show up on time. To hold themselves to a standard that most youth sports programs on this island have never introduced. We are going to ask them to not just be good, but to be great.
That is not cruelty. That is respect. Treating a young person like they are capable of excellence is the highest form of belief in them.
Our media network will reflect that standard. We will not tell sanitized success stories. We will document the real process. The struggles, the frustrations, the days when a kid wants to quit and decides not to.
We are an organization dedicated to helping kids on Bohol Island achieve their dreams of becoming successful, productive adults. Our baseball and softball programs are the vehicle. The character development is the destination.
“Treating a young person like they are capable of excellence is the highest form of belief in them.”
— Merv Moore, Sports & Media Director
The Paycheck Nobody Talks About
Here is the dream I carry around that nobody else seems to talk about.
Not every kid who walks through our gates is going to play in the Major Leagues or the Japanese League. That is reality, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
But a kid who earns $1,500 a month playing baseball in a European league? That is life-changing money for a family from Bohol. A player who spends three seasons in a Japanese minor league organization? That is a professional career built on this island’s clay.
A young woman who earns a college scholarship to study in Manila or abroad through a softball recruitment pathway that did not exist before? That is a family’s trajectory altered permanently.
And for some of our top prospects, there is the dream at the top of the ladder. A spot on the Philippine National Team. A professional contract. A career that starts here and ends somewhere nobody from Bohol has ever been.
Our media machine will document every step of that journey. For every kid on every rung of that ladder.
Same Instinct. Bigger Stage.
I think about that 24-year-old kid who started a newspaper to pick a fight with the most powerful media entity in his city.
I was not scared of the competition. I was angry that the story wasn’t being told. And I believed, with the irrational conviction of someone who has not yet learned to be cautious, that if I told it well enough, people would read it.
They did.
The story I am trying to tell now is larger, more complicated, and more important than anything I published in that weekly newspaper. It involves children who were born into circumstances they did not choose, on an island that the global sports world has largely ignored, with talent that has never had the right environment to grow.
My new challenge is not to beat a rival newspaper. It is to create opportunities for these kids to attend college and trade school, to compete for spots on the national baseball and softball teams, and to earn a living doing something they love.
The Coconuts Media Network is how the world follows along while we do it.
Four websites. A YouTube docuseries. Six social media channels that go live when operations begin next month. A publishing infrastructure built not to promote a brand or the founders, but to bear witness to something real.
The kids on Bohol Island are about to be challenged to meet a standard they have never been held to before. They will be pushed and stretched and asked to reach for something that feels impossibly far away.
And when they get there, not if, when, the world is going to know exactly how they did it.
Because we will have been telling the story the whole time.
Merv Moore is the Sports & Media Director of the Bohol Coconuts Baseball and Softball Club. He has coached youth baseball in Europe and Asia, and co-founded the Mister-Baseball and BaseballdeWorld international baseball platforms. His Moore or Less column publishes regularly at bohol-coconuts.com.
