A perfect cycle of dedication, initiative and luck has helped UTPA baseball assistant coach Norberto Lopez land where he belongs.
 
He had the dedication to devote to baseball, the initiative to become a professional player, the luck to have been given a chance, the dedication to find his passion and the initiative to become a better coach.
 
When Lopez was four, he was brought to the United States from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift, a mass immigration of Cubans who departed from Cuba's Mariel Harbor in 1980. After his family spent two weeks living in a tent under a bridge in Miami, they moved to Hialeah, Florida, where Lopez's parents, Norberto and Maria, started settling their life.
 
A year later, Lopez began playing baseball with the neighborhood kids. He went through little leagues, played at Monsignor Edward Pace High School and moved on to play as catcher at Broward Community College and Nova Southeastern University.  
 
Upon earning a bachelor's degree in business administration in 1999 at Nova Southeastern, he was drafted as a catcher by the Anaheim Angels and spent three years in their farm system. He started playing with the Butte Copper Kings in Montana. Then, he was moved to play short-season A ball with the Boise Hawks, in Idaho. Two weeks later, he was moved to California to play for the Lake Elsinore Storm in the Advanced A division. After one month in California, he was transferred to play for the Cedar Rapid Kernels in Iowa (Full Season A).
 
Lopez played for the Storm and the Arkansas Travelers (AA affiliate) over the next year and a half. In the middle of his third season, he advance to AAA and played for the Salt Lake Stingers.
 
In 2001, he made an appearance in major league camp.
 
After moving from state to state for four years, Lopez didn't know what his career would bring next.
 
So he decided to call his high school coach for advice and he suggested getting into coaching. Although the coach recommended that he started his career coaching with the Angels, Lopez decided to go to Broward College. But that didn't turnout as expected.
 
Soon after he got hired, the Angels offered Lopez a scouting position in the area, but he rejected it because he didn't want to travel all the time. The head coach at Broward, however, took the job, and that left the program with a great deal of uncertainty.
 
"So he leaves, and when he leaves I'm the new kid on the block. There are two older coaches, they start fighting to see who gets the head coach spot, and I was stuck in the middle... and it was miserable," Lopez said. "Everybody was out for their own and it was just a horrible year. That was my introduction to baseball as a coach."
 
The next year, Lopez went on to coach at American Heritage High School in Plantation, Florida. He was there for one year, and he still wasn't convinced that that is what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
 
So he retired from formal coaching for two years and taught lessons while he pursued a master's in exceptional student education at Nova Southeastern University.
 
"And that's how I think the Lord kind of works, because with those two things (coaching and Broward and American Heritage) I kind of pushed the envelope as if I was trying so hard to make it happen" he said. "Now I was sitting back and relaxing and letting the Lord work."
 
A new coach at Broward College offered Lopez another coaching position. He took it, and his perception of coaching changed forever.
 
"He came to me and said, 'Hey, I know you had a bad time here, but I'm here now and I want you to come here and do the offense. You don't have to recruit, you're just doing offense and that's about it,'" he said. "I went there and as soon as I went into the office there, everything just clicked. We did unbelievable."
 
Two years after he joined the program, Broward was at the National Junior College Athletic Association World Series, where the team finished third. As the hitting and catching coach, Lopez saw the team hit .301, set the home run record at the state tournament and win the Florida Community College Activities Association state title.
 
From there, he was named hitting and catching coach for the USA Baseball Youth National Team in 2006. That team beat the undefeated Cuban team and then won against the home team, Venezuela, in the finals of the COPABE 'AA' Youth Pan Am Championships.
 
That fall, he joined Florida Atlantic University as an assistant coach.
 
During the time he was at FAU, he developed a close relationship with the head coach at nearby Saint Thomas University, Manny Mantrana. Mantrana was well known for being a good hitting coach in Florida, and Lopez thought part of his success came from the vision program he implemented. The vision program focuses on working the six eye muscles that can help a baseball player intensify skills such as how clearly he sees the ball.
 
Lopez wanted to get a grasp of Mantrana's knowledge.
 
"Coach Mantrana was doing that stuff and I didn't know anything about it, so I was intrigued,” Lopez said. “When I was at FAU, I would go to his office and meet with him and ask him questions. He didn't want to tell me anything because he was trying to keep it a secret, but the more I kept on sticking around and budding my head in there, he just kept on opening up. He told me everything. That's how our relationship evolved... and then we came here."
 
Mantrana was named head coach of the University of Texas-Pan American in August 2008. Mantrana asked Lopez to join his coaching staff, and the two Florida coaches made their way to the Rio Grande Valley.
 
"Coach took a flyer on me and, boy, was he stupid! I got lucky that he wasn't thinking too clearly," Lopez said jokingly. "I'm very grateful for that because I didn't have recruiting experience. I needed to get the opportunity in order to get the experience."
 
Lopez was given the opportunity to become what he wanted to be – a recruiter.
 
"I'm very blessed that he gave me the opportunity because I shouldn't have gotten hired here. I didn't know the area, I didn't have any contacts in the area," he said. "I've had to get to know everybody in Texas, because we're from the East Coast and now we're recruiting the center and west side of the states."
 
But perhaps the biggest challenge was to switch the program's culture to a winning one.
 
"Culture is mostly what we stand for, that we're going to do things right. We're going to care about our effort. We're going to be hard workers. We're going to care about our grades. That's going to matter to us," he said. "We want to be committed with the total program, and the total program is not when the lights turn on at 7 o' clock and we're playing. We want our students to know that there is a direct correlation between how they do in school and how they do on the baseball field."
 
Lopez explained that there is a correlation between success in the classroom and success on the field. To be successful in the classroom, a student needs discipline. A baseball player needs discipline to become a good player, and when times get tough either in the classroom or on the field, the habits created through discipline will carry through.
 
For this reason, Lopez mentioned that the coaching staff is committed to recruiting "blue collar" baseball players. These are players that, as he explained, walk out of the field covered in dirt from head to toe, who have character, are coachable, and can serve as leaders. Players like recent graduates Mike McCarthy, Adrian de la Rosa and Vinnie Mejia.
 
"We built a foundation around these guys," he said."They took away that character that was being molded here and we started creating good habits."
 
Lopez understands that winning does not rely on talent alone. It wasn't exactly talent that drove Lopez to play professional baseball.
 
"I'm 5-6 without an ounce of ability, only my arm... I had a really strong arm," he said. "How did I get there? Because when somebody was sitting across the table from me, and they tell me I'm too short, very un-athletic, can't run, can't hit... You know what my mind was telling me the whole time that I sat there? 'I'm going to show you're wrong. I'm going to make it to the big leagues.' Every time I sat there and I heard that, what else did you want me to think? That I'm not good? How am I going to make it forward in life like that?"
 
According to Lopez, UTPA baseball now has the right people. 16 players have been added to the 2012-13 roster in addition to the "very special" class that came in last year.
 
Lopez, as a coach, is committed to this group of people making an emphasis that coaching is more about relationships than it is about baseball.
 
"I coach for relationships. I don't coach for anything else,” Lopez said. “At the end of the day when you leave this game, the only thing you're ever going to remember is the relationships that you built. Nobody cares about what you know unless they know you care about them."
 
So in the past four years, reconstructing the baseball program, getting to know the area and recruiting student-athletes have taught him that developing a relationship with the place he's at is probably just as important as developing relationships with its people.
 
"I've learned how important it is to care about where you are, to give everything you have where you are and not want to be somewhere else," Lopez said. "If you don't think it's special and you don't believe it's special, no one else will.”