International Sports Group
ABCA Hall of Famer

O’Connell was recently honored as the 2011 Coach of the Year by the National High School Coaches Association. He was also ABCA National High School Coach of the Year – 2004 and 2010 – and has been named Midwest Coach of the Year four times. In 1995, he skippered the USA Baseball North Team that featured four future major leaguers in the United States Olympic Festival in Colorado.

An accomplished author, O’Connell has published three books with Human Kinetics Press, Coaching Baseball: Techniques and Tactics, one of the top selling baseball handbooks and the textbook for coach licensing in the USA, Coaching Youth Baseball, a manual for youth coaches, and, most recently, Play Ball: 100 Baseball Practice Games.

Coach O’Connell is also a frequent speaker at clinics around the United States having presented at coaching clinics in nine states. For the past thirteen years he has also been Vice-President of International Sports Group, organizing and speaking at winter coaching clinics in Germany, Spain, Slovenia, Czech Republic, The Netherlands, Ireland and Austria. O’Connell has served as the Lead Envoy Coach in Germany for Major League Baseball since 1993 – spending fifteen of his summers developing players and coaches – and is currently a scout for the Baltimore Orioles.

Besides his avocation in baseball, he has been intensely involved with Milwaukee Irish Fest, the largest Irish music festival in the world, serving on its Board of Directors, supervising Festival activities and booking entertainment. He has been married to his wife Paula for 44 years and has three grown children and five grandchildren.

Pitching Central / Texas Baseball Ranch

R. Wolforth is the founder and CEO of Pitching Central and Ron Wolforth's Texas Baseball Ranch, LLC in Montgomery, TX. Coach Wolforth has written 5 books on pitching, the latest being his national best-seller The NEW Athletic Pitcher ™.

Since 2003, 76 of Coach Wolforth's clients have been drafted, including the 2011 Golden Spikes Award winner and #3 overall pick, Trevor Bauer. In that same time period, 146 of Coach Wolforth's pitchers have broken the 90mph barrier. He is considered the world's leading expert on the objective measurement of pitcher's performance and movement patterns. No one in the world today has developed more 90 mph arms in a single location since 2003.

Coach Wolforth has consulted for 3 MLB organizations and dozens of NCAA programs. He is a regular featured author in Collegiate Baseball and has been a feature speaker at the American Baseball coaches Association (ABCA) National Convention five times since 1999 as well as a presenter at the American Sports Medicine Institute's “Injuries in Baseball” Annual Conference.

Coach Wolforth has also been utilized by corporate organizations such as AXA Equitable Life as a motivational coach for their branch managers, mentoring them on how to improve performance and contributions from their team members.

His 20 year passion for uncovering possible constraints and limitations to baseball performance as well as identifying the keys to accelerated growth and development stems from the fact he was very dissatisfied with the level of his own performance as a college player and vowed to help other athletes avoid his mistakes and instead maximize their God-given potential. Hundreds of elite athletes from all over the world come to Montgomery, TX to work with Coach Wolforth. Some of his clients include Trevor Bauer, Scott Kazmir, Raul Ibanez and CJ Wilson.

While Coach Wolforth's playing career offered few superlatives, his academic career was quite a different matter. He was named both the Physical Education and the Secondary Education Student of the Year at Sam Houston State University in 1983.

Coach Wolforth is considered a master teacher by many in the baseball community and he has been referred to as “America's Pitching Coach” because of his practical, self-effacing and innovative approach to common performance issues.

Dutch Academies Technical Coordinator

As a player, Nijhoff played 9 years in the Dutch major League.
After getting his degree in Physical Education, he got heavily involved with coaching at various levels in various capacities.
From softball to baseball, in schools, camps, clinics, Nijhoff has gathered a lot of experience in his career.

He became a pitching instructor at Unicorns baseball academy in Rotterdam in 2005 and was a co-founder of the Bixie Baseball Academy in 2006.
He took the Head Coach job at PSV Eindhoven in the Overgangsklasse from 2008 to 2010 before becoming the technical coordinator for all Dutch academies.

Since 2010, he started to work in adding a stri,ng to his bow, with some classes in motor learning and performance. A field in which he worked with Frans Bosch, in order revamp the training methods in the Netherlands.
It certainly paid off as the forward-thinking Dutchman has seen 8 players signed to pro contracts and 14 more who went out to play college ball in the US since taking over at the helm of the academy development system.

Nijhoff is also the coordinator of all Dutch youth national teams and the pitching coach of the AAA team. 

MLB International
Strength & Conditioning Coordinator

In 1994 Jeff Krushell graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Kinesiology from the University of Calgary. While attending school he worked as a Strength and Conditioning Coach with the varsity teams as well as professional and nationally ranked athletes.

It was here he started his first company Performax Strength and Conditioning.

Moving to Edmonton in 1996 he worked as the Director of Athletic Development at the Edmonton Sport Institute, training athletes from many sports and developing camps and school programs that still exist today.

Late in 1997 Jeff moved on to the Royal Glenora Club of Edmonton as Director of Sport Performance Development overseeing the strength and conditioning for the Elite Athlete Training Center.


In February of 1998, Jeff was hired by the Toronto Blue Jays as the Minor League Strength and Conditioning Coordinator where he stayed for two full seasons before moving to the Major League Club in 2000. Here, Jeff oversaw the entire strength and conditioning program of the Toronto Blue Jays Baseball organization. Also, during this time he became very involved with Baseball Canada and Major League Baseball International promoting strength and conditioning to athletes and coaches.

During the spring of 2003 Jeff stepped down from the Blue Jays to pursue a private business “Krush Sport Performance”.Jeff Krushell, owner of Krush Performance, consults with Major League Baseball International overseeing the Strength and Development program on a global scale.


Jeff has consulted with the Edmonton Eskimos of the CFL and works with a handful of elite athletes at his home base in Edmonton.

Also, as the Director of Human Sport Performance, promoting cutting edge sport science and drug free sport,Jeff Krushell has developed a professional network of sport contacts that includes Athletes, General Managers, Coaches and Sport Scientists from every discipline, every level of sport and reaching all around the world.