Showcase at USF
Showcase at Long Beach State
CSULB
L G.
Feb 5, 2025
Son absolutely loves this place. The coaches are really dedicated and they keep him active, which is great.
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R W.
Sep 6, 2019
Good luck if your door daughter gets arm or knee injuries due to the intensive training schedule causing adverse effects on a teen's growth plates.A good coach teaches his player how to do an exercise to avoid injury. Instead of teaching my son how to lift weights to avoid injury, Coach Mike Hacker would ridicule my son in front of his peers and yell "that's why you have injuries, because you're doing it wrong." Mike did not show him the "correct" way to lift the weight. There was another instance where my son and one of his peers were spotting each other on some weights. Coach Mike yelled at the other boy to get out of his weight room for talking to my son and told him he won't bother sending my son out of the room because my son is not worth it.There are numerous instances of mental and verbal abuse from Coach Mike on the field as well. None of these instances were constructive but personal. I will not mention them in order to protect my son's identity.We have read about coaches who ridicule and verbally abuse certain players on their team causing the player to quit the sport for good. We never imagined this would be the case with our 13 year old. Our son had played successfully since he was 5 years old and played Majors prior to coming to BPA. We cannot express the sadness we have our son has left the sport because of his experience at BPA.We believe Coach Mike had a personal disliking for our son since he had expected to get a starting pitcher but got a kid with injuries due to growth plates not being fully fused yet.Before coming to BPA we were warned by a previous player about how he also had been verbally abused and ridiculed by Coach Mike, but we didn't believe him. We wish we had.We remember Coach Mike naming other ball clubs in the area and telling us how bad they were, that BPA was the best, even better than playing for the high school he previously taught at. We now believe this was to isolate players from considering playing for any other competing baseball club in the area. Regrettably, we convinced our son to stay longer than he should have because of this. Great leaders motivate young players to succeed by being fair, positive, patient, sincere, concerned and honest. Although Coach Mike knows baseball, these characteristics were nowhere to be found.Parents beware! There are no protections under the law for verbal and mental abuse of your adoloscent in extracarricular sports. Don't take a chance with your child's self esteem and baseball future. There are other baseball clubs in the area that develop young, successful college recruitments.
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Craig W.
Jan 31, 2021
Excellent instruction from the top down. My son loves the challenging practices and he's improving everyday.
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