Bohol Coconuts Baseball and Softball Club
Why one handshake in Germany, a catcher’s blocking drill, and a cold beer in Zurich set the compass for everything being built in Bohol today — and why the children waiting on these fields deserve nothing less.
The tournament was in Germany. I was 27 years old, leading the Swiss National Team at a Four Nations International Baseball Tournament, convinced I was building something worth believing in. Across the diamond, a quiet man was preparing his French National Team with a precision I had never witnessed. His name was Yoshio Yoshida — legendary shortstop and former manager of the Hanshin Tigers, one of the most storied franchises in Nippon Professional Baseball.
His English was not good. My Japanese was nonexistent. An interpreter made our introductions, and we shook hands and nodded — the universal language of two coaches who respect each other’s craft. But I watched him. For three full days I watched him the way a young pitcher studies a veteran’s grip from across the field, hungry for something he cannot name yet but knows he needs.
“I learned a drill from him to teach catchers how to block balls in the dirt, and it helped my catchers in Switzerland become adept at blocking balls. I became a sponge for three days — because I knew I was standing next to something rare.”
That catcher drill — simple, methodical, unmistakably Japanese in its repetition and intentionality — traveled back to Switzerland with me and transformed my backstops. I had always been intrigued by the marathon practices that define Japanese baseball culture: the deliberate preparation, the almost spiritual attention to fundamentals. Watching Yoshida prepare his team did not just give me a drill. It gave me a direction. I just did not yet know where that direction would ultimately lead.
After posting a .912 winning percentage and capturing three Swiss League titles in four seasons with the Therwil Flyers, I accepted the challenge of rebuilding the Zurich Challengers. Too much winning had made most of the Flyers’ players arrogant and complacent. No longer were they the hardest-working team in Switzerland. So I bolted to Zurich — and that is where the second Japanese connection found me.
Makoto “Machi” Fukamachi was an executive at Nissan and a member of the Challengers club. I was 30 years old. Machi was in his early 40s. We hit it off instantly, sharing cold beers after practice and talking baseball the way coaches talk when they have finally found someone who understands the noise. He joined me as an assistant on the Swiss National Team. Before Machi, I had always felt like I was on an island in Therwil — the only one in the club who truly knew the game. In Zurich, I found my guy.
“He was the only one who understood the noise that American coaches must endure with club politics in Europe. Being around Machi made my final two years in Switzerland not just bearable, but genuinely joyful.”
In 1999, an opportunity arose to join a second-division club in the Netherlands. I chose instead to get married and relocate to the Philippines. Some doors close so that the right ones can open.
The children who we will train in Bohol are not coming from comfortable suburbs. Many of them come from families where a single missed workday means an empty dinner table. They wake before sunrise to help parents who fish or farm or do whatever must be done to hold life together. And then they will come to us — no cleats, no gloves — but they will play like everything depends on it.
Because for them, it does. Baseball and softball will not hobbies for these kids. They are pathways — to scholarships, to discipline, to a version of themselves their families have not yet had the chance to imagine. When a young girl from a coastal barangay learns to field a ground ball cleanly and repeat it a hundred times without complaint, she is learning something that goes far beyond sport. She is learning that she is capable of excellence. That message alone can alter the arc of a life.
This is the fire we will see every single from these kids. Not the polished ambition of boys and girls who have everything. The raw, undecorated hunger of kids who have very little — and want so much more, not just for themselves, but for the people they love.
That hunger is precisely why the methodology matters so much. I do not want to give these children a watered-down version of the game. I want to give them the full weight of it — the discipline, the structure, the reverence for repetition that Yoshida demonstrated on a tournament field in Germany without saying a single word to me in English. That image has never left me, and it is the standard I will carry into every practice in Bohol.
Today, with the Bohol Coconuts, I want Japanese baseball and softball coaches to come here and teach these young Filipino boys and girls the Samurai way. If you do not have connections to people in Major League Baseball, that door is effectively shut. The American pipeline runs on relationships most of us will never be invited into. But Nippon Professional Baseball is different. They have been responsive to my emails. They have a genuine interest in what we are building here. That openness — that willingness to reach across an ocean toward something small and earnest and real — means everything when you are working with kids who cannot afford to wait.
“I love the way the Japanese respect the game and I want my kids to learn that. Not just the mechanics. The spirit behind the mechanics. The humility. The hunger. The honor.”
Even in the 1990s, when MLB was sending Envoy Coaches to Europe, I was a free agent — securing my own contracts, building my own networks, finding my own Yoshidas and Machis. That independence was never a disadvantage. It was a school. And everything I learned in that school — every drill absorbed in silence, every beer shared with a man who understood, every season spent on an island before finding your people — has led me here, to this island in the Visayas, to these children.
A handshake in Germany more than thirty years ago planted a seed. The children of Bohol deserve every bit of sunlight we can bring to it.
