To understand the vision behind the Coconuts Performance Center, you have to understand the man building it.
Coach Merv Moore is not a traditional real estate developer, nor is he just a baseball coach. He is a media entrepreneur, an international program builder, and a Texas-bred competitor who has spent the last three decades turning overlooked teams and raw startups into success stories.
From the baseball diamonds of Dallas to the national football stadium of Bhutan, his mandate has always been the same: Build it right, or don’t build it at all.
The Texas Foundation: Grit and The “Hoover”
Merv’s pedigree was forged in one of the most competitive baseball regions in the country: Dallas, Texas. As an All-District player at Seagoville High School, he earned the nickname “Hoover”—acting as a human vacuum cleaner for his defensive prowess at third base—while leading his squad with a blistering .479 batting average.
But his trajectory was tested early. A major auto accident resulted in a severe leg injury, forcing an agonizing 11-month recovery. Merv didn’t just return to the field; he elevated his game. He went on to Bethel University, where he was named Freshman of the Year, setting a school record with 113 at-bats as the leadoff hitter and starting centerfielder.
It was also at Bethel where Merv’s dual-threat capability emerged. Off the dirt, he broke barriers, becoming the first and only African American Editor-in-Chief in the history of the student newspaper, The Clarion.
The Media Mogul
Merv’s ability to command an audience translated immediately into the business world. After an award-winning stint as the sports editor at The Houston County Courier in East Texas, he returned to his hometown in 1991 to found The Seagoville Gazette. Through sheer force of will and 16-hour workdays, Merv built the publication into the city’s most-read newspaper in just five months.
After nearly two years of grueling, non-stop publishing, burned out but victorious, Merv pivoted. He packed his bags and took his leadership philosophy overseas.
The European Dynasty
Merv arrived in Switzerland to take over the Therwil Flyers, the country’s largest baseball and softball club. The impact was immediate and devastating to the competition. In his rookie season, the Flyers posted a perfect record on Swiss soil. Over his first two seasons, they went an astonishing 55-6, eventually securing three consecutive Swiss League Championships.
But Merv’s standard is relentless. Feeling that “too much winning” had made his Therwil players complacent, he did the unthinkable: he walked away from a dynasty, relocated to Zurich, and took over the fifth-place Zurich Challengers. In just two seasons, he completely rebuilt the culture, leading the Challengers to their first Swiss title in 12 years.
By 1999, the Dutch Major League in the Netherlands came calling. But Merv made a defining life choice: he opted to step away from the European leagues to move to the Philippines, get married, and start a family.
Dominating the Digital Landscape
Retiring from the dugout didn’t keep Merv out of the game. Leveraging his sports writing experience, he launched “The Talkin’ Texan,” which rapidly became the premier international baseball website in the world.
The site’s traffic was so massive that the International Baseball Association (now the WBSC) officially contacted Merv, skeptical that a single independent site was pulling 31,000 visitors during an international tournament. Merv simply handed the IBA officials the keys to his backend Control Panel. They saw the verifiable data and never questioned him again.
After co-founding the Mister-Baseball website and acting as a one-man international newsroom, Merv refused to work full-time for free when his European partners tried to change the deal. He walked away and launched Baseball de World, scaling it into the internet’s absolute authority on international baseball with over 120,000 monthly visitors, before successfully selling the asset.
The Asian Expansion: Gold Medals and First Pitches
Once his children reached high school, the itch to coach returned. Merv’s international reputation led to a series of historic national appointments across Asia—always dictated by his unyielding commitment to his family (turning down a two-year contract at a Sports Academy in Shanghai when his wife’s visa was denied).
Brunei (2019): In just one month, Merv trained the men’s and women’s national fastpitch softball teams for the Masters International Tournament. The results were historic: the women captured their first-ever Gold medal, and the men took Bronze, defeating rival Indonesia for the first time in over a decade.
Bhutan (2022): Taking over the BBSA, Merv built a national baseball infrastructure from the dirt up. He selected and trained the country’s first national team, introduced inaugural youth leagues, camps, tournaments, and staged the first-ever baseball game played under the lights in the national football stadium.
The Epiphany in the Himalayas
After 17 months in Bhutan, Merv accepted an invitation to train the national team in Nepal. But Merv’s tolerance for mediocrity and backroom politics is zero. After witnessing systemic corruption within the organization in Kathmandu, he left the country after just four months.
It was on the flight out of the Himalayas that the vision finally crystallized.
Merv realized that if he wanted a program run a full-time program with elite development and profound community impact, he couldn’t just coach it—he had to own the dirt it was built on. He decided to return to his family’s home in Bohol, build a world-class compound, and dedicate the rest of his career to developing the first native-born Filipino Major League Baseball superstar.
The Coconuts Performance Center is the culmination of a lifetime of championships, media entities, and international program building. And for the first time, Coach Merv is inviting an exclusive syndicate of Texas leaders to help him build the dynasty.