There is a particular kind of knowledge that no classroom produces and no seminar can replicate. It comes from landing in a foreign country with a bag, a coaching credential, and a handshake agreement — and discovering very quickly whether the people who invited you were serious about what they promised.
Coach Merv Moore has accumulated that knowledge across three continents, a dozen international tournaments, and assignments that ranged from first-class hospitality to a three-month hotel bill nobody warned him he would be paying himself.
The Founders Club on Bohol Island is not a concept someone drew up in a conference room. It is the physical and financial structure that emerged from those experiences — the ones that worked and, perhaps more importantly, the ones that did not.
Understanding what the Founders Club is, and why it is built the way it is, begins with understanding the road that led Merv to Bohol.
The Benchmark Was Set in Brunei
Ask Coach Merv to describe the highest standard he ever witnessed in international baseball hospitality, and he does not hesitate. It was not a European federation. It was not an American organization with a multimillion-dollar budget. It was the Brunei Baseball and Softball Association, and the Masters International Tournament they hosted remains, in his assessment, the most precisely organized baseball event he has ever attended.
Everything worked. Every logistical detail had been thought through before a single foreign coach or player set foot in the country. The facilities were impeccable. The scheduling held. The hospitality was not performative — it was structural. The organization had built systems that respected the foreign guests they had invited, and those systems showed.
That experience became Merv’s internal measuring stick for what it means to host someone properly. Not just generously, but thoughtfully. There is a difference. A generous host throws a good party. A thoughtful host anticipates what a guest needs before the guest knows to ask for it. Brunei was the latter, and it set a standard he has carried into everything the Bohol Coconuts are building.
Switzerland and the Limits of Beautiful Scenery
Merv also spent six years coaching in Switzerland, with the Therwil Flyers and the Zurich Challengers. Both clubs understood the fundamentals of supporting a foreign coach — housing, logistics, a sense of belonging.
The native Texan was able to work because he was not spending his energy managing the complications of daily life in an unfamiliar country. That is not a small thing. A coach who is distracted by logistical uncertainty is never fully present for the athletes.
But Switzerland, for all its beauty, carries a cost of living that swallows a coaching salary almost entirely. A coach there works hard and saves little. The scenery is extraordinary. The lifestyle, in the accounting sense, is not sustainable for someone trying to build something over the long term.
Bohol is a different equation entirely. A coach here can live well on a fraction of what European life requires and actually set money aside every month. That shift — from treading water financially to genuinely building toward something — changes the relationship a coach has with their work and with the place they are living.
Bhutan: When Warmth Outweighs Compensation
Not every chapter of Coach Merv’s international career came with a paycheck. His 17 months in the Kingdom of Bhutan were self-funded from start to finish — flights, meals, housing, all of it out of pocket.
He describes those months as among the most meaningful of his life.
The reason is straightforward. Bhutan Baseball and Softball Association President Karma Dorji and his staff treated Merv with a quality of human warmth that financial compensation cannot manufacture.
When the people around you are genuinely invested in your wellbeing, the absence of a salary becomes secondary to the presence of purpose. The work itself — introducing a sport to children who had never seen a baseball diamond — carried its own reward.
This matters to Founders Club members because it reveals something essential about what Coach Merv values in a working environment and, by extension, what he intends to create on Bohol Island.
The Coconuts will not be the organization that compensates for poor culture with a bigger check. They will be the organization that builds the kind of culture that makes the work feel like a privilege.
Nepal: The Lesson That Built the Foundation
The hardest chapter was Nepal, and Merv does not soften it.
The Nepal Baseball and Softball Association promised him a free apartment. He arrived. He worked. He waited. The apartment never came.
What came instead was three months of hotel bills that were entirely his responsibility — because a verbal commitment between parties who trusted each other had no structural enforcement behind it. No written agreement. No accountability mechanism. No one to call when the promise dissolved.
He paid it. He learned from it. And he turned that lesson into the foundational principle of how the Bohol Coconuts Baseball and Softball Club operates.
Promises made to coaches, investors, and community partners are backed by written agreements and transparent systems. The Eco-Lodge Suite model is not built on good intentions. It is built on documented obligations.
Revenue sharing percentages are specified. Occupancy expectations are explained. The coach housing arrangement is defined. Every party in the relationship knows what they are agreeing to before anyone boards a plane or signs a check.
Nepal was not a grievance. It was a blueprint for exactly what not to do — and the Coconuts was constructed in direct response to it.
What the Eco-Lodge Suite Model Actually Does
The Founders Club offers a small number of Eco-Lodge Suites to an exclusive group of early investors. Each suite is a revenue-producing hospitality asset within the Coconuts Performance Center property on Bohol Island.
When the suite is occupied by guests, it generates between 600 and 1,500 U.S. dollars per month depending on occupancy. The revenue is shared with the suite owner on terms that favor the Founder when they book directly and reflect a standard hospitality split when the property coordinates bookings on their behalf.
The foreign coaching connection is deliberate. Coaches affiliated with the Coconuts program have access to shared housing on the island for under 100 U.S. dollars per month.
In a country where a full, comfortable life can be maintained on a modest budget, that figure is not a hardship. It is an opportunity. A coach here is not surviving. They are accumulating.
The suite investment is designed to be recovered within one to two years at reasonable occupancy rates. Beyond that point, the suite continues producing income indefinitely while the Founder retains full naming rights and complimentary access during personal stays.
Coach Merv and General Manager Lerma will draw no salary from the Bohol Coconuts. Seventy percent of operational funds go directly to equipment, the community soup kitchen, and academic and social programs for athletes.
The Eco-Lodge model exists precisely because the mission requires sustainable funding that does not depend on charity or grant cycles. The suites fund the work. The work produces the athletes. The athletes, over time, produce the results that validate the entire vision.
The Coaches Being Recruited and Why It Matters to Founders
One of the more revealing windows into what the Founders Club represents comes from a conversation Coach Merv had recently with a young American coach — someone he refers to only as Seth.
Seth is early in his career, unattached, and genuinely motivated to build something internationally rather than wait for an opening in a saturated domestic market.
The young American fits the profile of coach the Coconuts want to attract: talented, hungry, and willing to trade the familiar for something that could define his career instead of just sustaining it.
Merv did not make a pitch. He never does. His view is that the decision to relocate your life to an island in the Philippines and commit to a long-term youth development mission is not the kind of decision that responds to persuasion.
The people who belong here will recognize that they belong here.
Nearly twenty coaches from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan have now reached out. Some are further along in their thinking than others.
A handful are serious in a way that Merv recognizes from his own decades of international movement — the kind of serious that comes from having already decided, internally, that a different kind of life is possible.
For Founders Club members, this pipeline of international coaches matters for a concrete reason. The quality of the coaching staff directly determines the quality of the athlete development.
Better coaches produce better prospects. Better prospects attract the attention of MLB and NPB scouts. And that attention is precisely what transforms the Bohol Coconuts from a well-intentioned youth program into a historically significant one.
What Bohol Island Actually Offers
More than 1.4 million tourists visited Bohol in 2025. They came for the beaches, the Chocolate Hills, the tarsiers, the diving. They found what travelers have been finding here for decades — a place that is genuinely beautiful without trying very hard at it.
What most of them did not find, because a week is not enough time to find it, is the pace of daily life that settles into you after you stay long enough. The warmth of the people, which is not a tourism-brochure claim but a documented cultural reality for anyone who has lived here.
The sense that the world outside is moving very fast and that Bohol, for reasons that are difficult to articulate quickly, is not.
Coach Merv has lived in Europe. He has lived in Asia. He grew up in the United States and has spent meaningful time in Texas. His assessment of Bohol against all of those places is not the enthusiasm of someone who visited for a week.
He has chosen it for the mission. He has chosen it for the athletes. He has also chosen it because the life available here — at a cost that makes the developed world look like an exercise in organized financial exhaustion — is simply better, by the measures that matter most to him.
The Invitation
The Founders Club is not issuing a general call. The number of Eco-Lodge Suites available is small by design. The founding cohort is intended to be a close group of people who are aligned not just on the financial opportunity but on the underlying purpose.
Coach Merv is specific about this. The development of legitimate MLB and NPB prospects from Bohol Island has never been done. That is the ambition.
The children who will attempt it come from families where a baseball glove represents a real sacrifice, not a casual purchase. They will arrive at practice motivated in a way that comfortable circumstances rarely produce.
The Founders who make this possible are not donors. They are stakeholders in a mission that has a financial structure, a development timeline, a coaching philosophy built from thirty years of international experience.
The right people will recognize all of that when they encounter it. That is the only pitch being made here.