The way you do anything

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

So, yes, yes, TikTok is the devil and the Chinese now have all our personal information. What Xi Jinping is going to to with the knowledge that I like baseball bloopers and odd couple animal buddies is outside of my paygrade, but whatever.

But my wife loves TikTok. Her “algorithm” is a little more esoteric than mine, so she gets all kinds of things popping up on her screen. And the other day, she came across this olde fellow with the uner handle of “Coach Ballgame” — which I thought was pretty clever.

It turns out that as a kid, he was so into sports of any kind that he always wanted to go to the ballgame — any ballgame, and so that became his nickname. The “Coach” part came later as he did indeed become a youth sports coach.

It seem like he has moved on to sharing his knowledge and in-

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sights with the world through online video streaming. He has throusands of followers (and apparently the Chinese governmenr) on TikTok, where he offers tips on things for coaches like how to deal with bad officiating, how to handle parents who are angry because little Timmy or Suzy are clearly all-stars and should be getting more playing time or playing a different position or batting higher up in the lineup, or how to motivate a player who isn’t playing up to their abilities.

These are all great pieces of advice and all very relevant to youth sports coaches— which you already know if you’ve spent any time at all doing it.

But the best thing I got from watching Coach Ballgame out of the corner of my eye while sitting next to my wife on the couch was this little nugget of wisdom: “The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”

While that might just sound like fortune cookie mumbojumbo or word salad, there’s a lot to take away from that idea.

It’s not his quote. It has been attributed to Martha Beck, Tom Waits and Suzzanne Evans in different places, but the message is the same regardlees… everything you do is worth doing to the best of your abilities. If you do something halfheartedly, chances are you will find it easier to do so on other things, so give everything your all, all the time. Right, Coach?