The toddler with the spiky black hair, red tank top and oversized shorts had only been walking for about a year, but there he was in the lobby of a recreation center in the San Diego area about 17 years ago, dribbling a basketball without having to look at it as fans cleared space to watch him in astonishment before filing into the gymnasium to watch kids three times his age play with less skill and enthusiasm.
The legend of Bear Bachmeier, who was 2 years old at the time, was born.
“There are a lot of stories out there about Bear growing up and all the amazing things he did,” says older brother Hank Bachmeier, the former Boise State, Louisiana Tech and Wake Forest quarterback, “and all of them are true.”
Saturday night, the now-19-year-old athletic prodigy will write another chapter of his impressive journey when he becomes the first freshman to start a season-opening game at quarterback for BYU at the so-called Quarterback Factory — LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo — when the Cougars host Portland State.
Those who have known the No. 47-wearing Bear since he was a youngster — older brothers Hank and Tiger (also a new BYU player in 2025, a receiver), parents April and Michael, and high school coaches George Wilson and Alex Rosenblum — say they aren’t surprised.
“There are a lot of stories out there about Bear growing up and all the amazing things he did, and all of them are true.”
— Hank Bachmeier
“If you know the Bachmeier family, you know they don’t do anything the usual, standard way,” Wilson told the Deseret News last week after Bear was announced as the starter who will replace Jake Retzlaff, now at Tulane. “Highly unusual, but extremely effective.”
They also do almost everything with a flair, athletically and academically, beginning with Hank, then Ella, then Tiger, then Bear, and finally Buck (his father sometimes calls him Cougar), a ninth-grader who also plays quarterback, albeit left-handed.
Building a sports-oriented family on military principles
The intent of this profile piece is to further introduce Bear to a BYU fan base that absolutely fawns over its quarterbacks.
But to understand how the former Stanford spring practice participant was able to learn BYU’s playbook in less than two months and vault past two experienced players and into the starting QB role at a school that prides itself on outstanding play and leadership from its QBs, one must learn about the Bachmeier family as a whole, and how the young man was raised — a ball of some sort in one hand, a book in the other, and respect for others, especially elders, as a guiding and fundamental principle.
“You shake hands, you look them in the eye, and you give them respect,” Hank said. “That’s what my dad passed on to us. You call your elders ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ The way you honor your family outside (the house), in the public realm, is with respect. Your last name means a lot.”
Michael went to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he played basketball briefly, and was commissioned as a Marine. His grandfather fought in World War II in the Battle of Midway, Battle of Wake Island, and the Guadalcanal Campaign.
His father was a Navy fighter pilot who died in a plane crash on a night run. He was raised by his stepfather, William Lawrence Henry Jr., beginning when he was 3, and named his first son, Hank, after that stepfather. Why the Bachmeiers gave their next three sons animal names was detailed by Bear after his first practice in Provo on July 30.
“It’s a long story,” Bear said, before running through the aforementioned family military history and finishing with a laugh and saying: “Dad decided the best (son with an animal name) has got to be named Bear.”
April was born in Thailand, moved to the United States with her family when she was 5, and grew up on the East Coast. A decent high school athlete herself, April playfully suggests that her children got their athleticism from her.
Like Bear, Hank was also highly recruited out of Murrieta Valley High School before picking Boise State. His debut game, against Florida State, was spectacular. He was recently cut by a Canadian Football League team and now has his eye on making a United Football League roster.
The only girl, Ella, might be the best athlete in the family, her brothers say. She is currently working on an MBA at the University of Redlands after a sensational track and field career at that Division III school in Southern California.
Tiger — his given name is James — recently graduated from Stanford in two and a half years with a degree in computer science and plans to return to that prestigious school for an advanced degree when his playing days at BYU and professional football are over. Well-spoken, affable and articulate, he’s already becoming a media favorite.
Family first, and always, for Bachmeiers of Murrieta Valley
Hank, Buck and the parents accompanied the brothers on their official visit to BYU in late April, and Buck was already so familiar with BYU’s history that he could click off names of former BYU quarterbacks and also talk analytics with some of the Cougars’ coaching staff, including Kelly Poppinga, the family having been familiar with BYU’s special teams coach when he was at Boise State with Hank.
“They push the boundaries,” Hank said of their parents. “You have to push the boundaries to be able to have four kids play at a high college level and succeed and play early. … But we didn’t just do football and sports. My (siblings) are very talented in music, too. Tiger plays three or four instruments. Bear can play the guitar and can actually sing pretty well. They’re into investing. They’re into a lot. They are just really high-end individuals, well rounded in a lot of different things.”
In his first chat with reporters after earning the starting job, Bear acknowledged that his go-to tune on the guitar is “Wagon Wheel” by Darius Rucker and that he can also sing a little bit. He said he’s not quite as well rounded as Tiger, a “different dude” who can fly airplanes and write computer coding, in addition to catching passes and returning kicks.
Athletically, the Bachmeiers patterned some of their ways after the Gerhart family up Interstate 15 at Norco High. That family produced two NFL players, running back Toby Gerhart, a Doak Walker Award winner at Stanford, and Garth, an offensive lineman at Arizona State before playing for the Cleveland Browns.
Talk to any of the Bachmeier brothers and they will quickly mention the sacrifices their parents made, financially and with their time. For instance, it takes 40-45 minutes to drive from their home near Lake Elsinore to the high school in Murrieta.
“We didn’t come from much,” Hank said. “But we never had to do without anything.”
Michael Bachmeier owned some rental properties, worked in real estate and did some consulting for environmental companies before a brain tumor was discovered in 2019, “a pretty serious deal,” according to Hank.
None of the kids were allowed to get their driver’s license until they were 17 or 18, due in part to the long, winding, sometimes dangerous road down into town, and partly so the parents could keep tabs on them as much as possible, Hank said.
Noted April: “Believe it or not, it snows up here in this part of Southern California.”
In other ways, they were a typical American family.
“There was a military aspect to our upbringing, but not over the top,” Hank said. “Dad let us sleep in. We ate whatever (we wanted). We would go through literally 15-20 gallons of milk a week, and we have four freezers, just big ol’ freezers full of meat.
“We ate Thai (food), Asian (food). I got to the point where I hated rice. We would just pound rice, chicken and steak, like, all the time,” he continued. “That is what we grew up on. We drank tons of milk, ate a lot of cereal and drank a lot of chocolate milk, whatever it might be.”
But while the family never obsessed over diet and nutrition as many families in high-level sports do these days, their training methods were often at an elite, albeit unusual and at times groundbreaking, level.
High on a mountaintop — a superstar emerges
In a feature article on Bear before his junior season at Murrieta Valley High, the Los Angeles Times described the family’s homestead as something out of a Louis L’Amour novel, or from the old Western television show “Bonanza.”
“It starts with the boys having lived in a forest. Their home in … Rancho Capistrano is on top of a mountain off Ortega Highway near Lake Elsinore that is surrounded by the Cleveland National Forest. Phone reception goes away climbing the hills during the half-hour drive toward their three-acre property,” wrote Eric Sondheimer.
Tiger agreed with that assessment, more or less, and noted that the brothers turned the garage into a makeshift weight room and training facility, with Bear leading the way on that endeavor.
“Bear would work out after school, then come home and work out some more. He was always working out.”
— April Bachmeier on her son Bear
The driveway leading to the house is not paved, and on a steep incline. Bear was known for filling a wagon with 45-pound weight plates and pulling it up and down the driveway in the middle of the night for hours on end.
“One Thursday night before a game, it was pretty late, and all you see was a little bit of a flashlight from there, someone running up and down the hill,” Tiger said. “Of course, it was Bear. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but it just showed his pure will and determination in wanting to accomplish something. It speaks to his character and what he will bring to this BYU team.”
Tiger also said that his brother makes a lot of “cool Patrick Mahomes throws” and can turn would-be sacks into “13-second plays of just pure scrambling and improvising and making a play.”
He said the brothers’ mantra is outlined in the book “Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable” by Tim Grover.
“Bear would work out after school, then come home and work out some more,” April said. “He was always working out.”
Hank Bachmeier said there were a lot of “unique environmental factors and influences” that led to his and his younger brothers’ development in sports, including how their father “lives vicariously through his kids” after the brain tumor was discovered and treated.
“So he is very passionate about all of it,” Hank said. “We owe a lot of our success to our parents.”
Darkness was never an issue in the “rural, equestrian area where we grew up,” Hank said. “We would play at night. My dad would turn the car lights on, or whatever. … There were people who would say, ‘What are those people doing up there?’ My parents got criticized about some things they did, some of their methods, methods that are really mainstream now.”
From homeschooled to John Beck to a high school star
April Bachmeier says that all the action didn’t happen outdoors. When it was time to come inside, the boys and even Ella would invent all kinds of crazy games and activities involving sports, including hitting socks with baseball bats, pretending to be WWE brawlers, or creating a makeshift obstacle course down a long hallway in the house where they would often get screamed at for knocking pictures off walls or tipping vases and trophies over.
“When you went through the obstacle course, you were hit,” she said. “It got pretty rough in there.”
Often, it was Tiger and Bear against Hank.
Said Hank: “I can’t do it anymore because they would both kick my butt.”
Some of the Bachmeier kids were homeschooled during their junior high years — between the fifth and eighth grades, roughly — but Hank says that only gave them more time to train and work out, and their parents never went easy on them in the studying department.
“My dad would hand us a Malcolm Gladwell book, or economics books,” Hank said. “We didn’t have a regular curriculum, but by the time we got to (high school), we were just as prepared as anybody else.”
For Bear, those study habits would come in handy when he got to BYU. Monday, he credited BYU assistant quarterbacks coach Matt Mitchell for helping him learn the BYU offense playbook in rapid fashion.
Mitchell “taught me that whole playbook in a month, two months,” Bear said. “He helped out immensely.”
Hank now has a 7-month-old son named Bronco, coincidentally. He was one of the first high school quarterbacks to take advantage of former BYU QB John Beck’s 3DQB Elite QB Training in Southern California, and Bear has followed suit.
When Bear was getting acclimated to Provo in July, Beck returned to Utah to work him out there and gave the lifelong Catholic some tips on navigating Provo and BYU, which is supported by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“He’s been such a great resource to utilize. I started training with him when I was in seventh grade,” Bear said. “I don’t want to nerd out, but we get into the weeds of biomechanics and trying to refine my kinematic sequence. I just called him last week about his process going into game days and what it is from Sunday to Friday night. Very grateful for John Beck.”
A 2-year-old doing 10-year-old things
The Bachmeiers say that Hank, Ella and Tiger demonstrated eye-popping athleticism early on, but Bear took that to a whole new level, like the time he was 2 and dribbling a basketball like Steve Nash.
“People literally stopped and created space and watched and were like, ‘What the heck?’” said April. “His hand-eye coordination was unbelievable from the time he was a little kid.”
April said Bear wasn’t born bigger than most babies, but by the time he was 6 months old, he was one of the biggest. By the age of 2, “his thighs and legs were huge,” she said. “And he was smart. If you ask Bear about any sport, he knows about it. When he was 2, he was watching candlepin bowling on TV. Bear was very into learning sports at an early age.”
Hank said Bear would carry a plastic whiffle ball bat everywhere he went.
“He was always saying, ‘Dad, throw me the ball. I have to hit the ball,’” Hank said. “He would go up to random strangers with that darn whiffle bat and tell them to throw him his ball, even when he was 2, 3 years old.”
Bear started playing tackle football when he was 5, and was named the league’s MVP that same year. “He would literally score nine or 10 touchdowns a game,” Hank said.
Hank made the cover of IE Preps Magazine, which highlights youngsters and high schoolers in the Inland Empire area of California, when he was 12. So did DJ Uiagalelei, a St. John Bosco product who played at Clemson, Oregon State and Florida State. Bear made the cover when he was 5.
“The following year, I asked him what his goal was for touchdowns, and he said 70,” April said. “He actually got 77.”
Michael always wanted Bear to play on teams with Tiger, so he would often play against kids three or four years older than he was in baseball and basketball. There are many in the area between Los Angeles and San Diego who believe Bear could be a Major League Baseball player if he focused solely on that sport.
His high school baseball coach was Bryn Wade, the third cousin of Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in the major leagues. When Bear signed to play football for Stanford, Wade sent a letter to the Cardinal’s head baseball coach to tell him that Bear could also help the baseball program, if given a chance, according to April.
After not playing baseball as a sophomore, Bear decided to play as a junior and led the conference in home runs, earning the Silver Bat Award and making the all-CIF first team.
In basketball, Bear didn’t do the traveling all-star circuit stuff that kids almost have to do nowadays to make the team at a large high school. He’d show up for tryouts, make the team, and become one of its best players. Tiger and Hank both said he was known for his ability to come up clutch, either at home playing H-O-R-S-E or in front of hundreds in a high school gym.
“He would go to the free-throw line with his team down one, and he’d go make two free throws,” Hank said. “He was Mr. Clutch. All that stuff about him is true.”
BYU’s Roderick said the Cougars recruited Tiger and Bear when they were in high school, but lost out to Stanford on both occasions, which is understandable considering that school’s academic prowess. But when BYU coaches got a second chance at the brothers, they pounced.
“As soon as we saw his name in the transfer portal, we called him right away. And fortunately he picked up the phone, and I was talking to him the next day, basically,” Roderick said. “Bear was a guy we wanted out of high school, and so did everybody in the country. He could have gone anywhere he wanted.”
A big brother’s advice to BYU’s ‘very passionate’ fan base
Hank Bachmeier is fairly active on social media, and it didn’t take him long to discover that BYU “puts out a lot of great social media stuff” and that the school has a “very passionate” fan base.
While telling fans that Bear is “a really, really special talent,” he also cautioned that there are “going to be some growing pains,” such as the ones he experienced in four seasons at Boise State.
“I didn’t leave there under the best of circumstances,” he acknowledged.
While stating that BYU’s soft early schedule “kind of helps Bear out a little bit,” Hank said everything is not going to be sunshine, butterflies and rainbows for the true freshman and that BYU fans should expect that.
“He’s never been out there (in a college game), and he’s going to freakin’ make some mistakes,” Hank said. “People should be prepared for that. … So I guess what I’m trying to say is, just give him the opportunity to be able to make those mistakes.”
But the sky is the limit, Hank stresses.
“I was watching that Chiefs-Bills playoffs game, the one that was a crazy shootout and went to overtime, and I am watching Mahomes and (Josh) Allen, and I see their skillsets and the characteristics that they have developed, and I see Bear,” Hank said. “He’s got that potential in him.”
Hank is the first to note that Bear hasn’t done anything yet on the college level, “but the way things are going for him, the trajectory and everything, if he just kind of stays on the same path it’ll be a really fun season for him.”
