Known throughout the baseball community as “Coach Mark”, our founder is the consummate baseball guy. As a kid, he had a dream to play professional baseball. Although he fell short of that goal, he did play D1 baseball at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. He played for legendary college coach, the late, great Barry Myers. Mark was a four year starter for the Bears from 1981-1985. He graduated from there with a degree in interpersonal communications.
In 2006 Mark started his first travel team. It was a talented 13U team called the Altoona Curve Jr’s. Mark and Dave Brisbin ran the team and it was very successful. Mark’s son, Christian, was on that team. In 2010, Mark met travel ball icon Rob Bruno, founder of NorCal Baseball in California. Rob became Mark’s first mentor and helped Mark transition the Curve Jr’s over to NorCal East. For the next couple of years, NorCal East was the sister organization to Rob’s elite level travel program.
In 2010 most of the players on the first NorCal East team were seniors and 21 players from that team earned D1 scholarships. That team of players from the northeast also made it to the final 8 in the 17U WWBA.
In 2011 Mark made a difficult decision to transition NorCal East over to Jeff Petty’s Canes Baseball. For the next 3 years Mark ran the Mid Atlantic Canes and helped Canes baseball expand to the northeast and establish itself as one of the top programs in the country. The Mid Atlantic Canes teams had enormous success and continued to help players move on to college and professional baseball.
In 2014 Mark accepted an attractive sponsorship opportunity from Chandler Bats. The success on the field continued, as well as players moving on to college baseball. But, after only one year with Chandler it became apparent that Mark needed to finally become independent of all third party relationships and solely under his leadership. Simply put, Mark had a vision for what the program needed to be and he was sure it would be successful. He was right. In 2015 Mark formed US Elite Baseball and coined the slogan
“Uncommon Standards”.
The success of US Elite Baseball under Mark’s guidance was impressive. From 2015 to 2024 US Elite placed over 75% of its players in college. US Elite teams were also consistently ranked by Perfect Game as one of the top 20 teams in the country. Perfect Game listed US Elite as one of the top programs in the country. In 2016 Coach Jason Ferber (Coach Ferbs) led US Elite to its first National Championship, taking home the gold over Elite Squad in the prestigious USA Baseball National Championships. In 2020 US Elite’s 15U team, led by Head Coach, Christian Helsel, won the national championship at the Perfect Game World Series, beating Canes National and 5 Star National to claim the title. Not to be outdone, Coach Matt LaNeve’s team won several national championships. But, the success of the program was just about winning. It was also about developing people. US Elite became widely accepted as one of the best programs in the country for emphasizing life skills like integrity, character, hustle, honesty and very high academic standards. US Elite became the program that college coaches could count on for talented players who played the game the right way.
In October of 2022 Mark helped US Elite transition over to a new owner. After 17 years of evolving his programs to the highest level in travel baseball, he took a much needed break from travel baseball. However, Mark was not sitting idle during that time. He began formulating plans to reenter youth sports with refreshing new ideas. One was to start a new travel program called D1D National. In Mark’s own words, he describes his motivation for starting a new program. “First off, I still have the passion and desire to help these young ball players reach their goals. Over the last 19 years I have personally been a part of nearly 1,000 success stories. That’s always been my main reason for doing any of this. I love baseball, I love kids and I love their big dreams. Helping them succeed and at the same time, helping them learn life skills is exactly what I love to do. Secondly, travel baseball is a bit of a mess right now. It’s grown into something it was never intended to be. It’s very hard for families to find a quality program truly designed to help the individual player. I started D1D National to be the program that sets an entirely new standard for all other programs in the country. We have some trendsetting ideas that we cannot wait to implement. Whoever said “there is a better mousetrap” was right. We’re it”.
The first D1D National teams will take to the field in the summer of 2025.
