World of Good Blogburst, Little League Style

One of the principal tenets of this blog is that acts of kindness are far more common than we realize. This week's World of Good (WOG) is a great example of just that.

How many times have you driven past a kids' sporting event? Have you ever considered the amount of volunteer labor hours it represents? You can see the coaches, but you can't see all of the administration, financial donations, team parent meetings and so forth that make it possible for the kids to play ball. I have managed three little league baseball teams and one soccer team. I've coached on two more baseball and one more soccer team. In each case, I was surrounded by others who gave far more time to be team moms, league presidents, treasurers, secretaries, umpires, groundskeepers and so on. The game you drive by rests on the shoulders of many, many volunteers.

Coaching these guys is more fun than a grown up should be allowed to have.
I picked a state at random and in a few seconds found a Little League website that represents thousands upon thousands all across the country. Check out the Post Falls, Idaho Little League home page. Everyone you see listed on that page and the ones behind it, gives time and money they could have spent watching TV, fishing, hunting or doing other things for themselves so that the kids can play ball.

That is the reality of life in America today.

In the background, you see a volunteer coach, an umpire who is being paid nearly nothing if he is being paid at all and banners from many local businesses who donate the funds to make plays like this possible.
If you watch prime time TV, you see shows about self-absorbed young adults, grimly determined cops and lawyers and doctors or you see news programs about death and destruction. If you look out the window as you run errands in your neighborhood, you see real life.

They don't look anything like each other.

This coaching lessons represents several evenings spent at home with coaching books or videos learning how to teach baseball to children. You don't just wander out onto the field and coach.
In the end, doesn't the way we behave become a matter of expectations? That is, if we see the world as a cruel place or a giant playpen for a Roman orgy lifestyle, then we don't have too much to live up to. If we accept that normalcy is evidenced by the hundreds of children playing baseball in our neighborhood parks and the thousands of adults that made that possible after they came home from work or ran the last errand, then we look at our own lives and what we should give to others quite differently.

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For more WOGgy goodness, visit this page. It's got links to all of our previous WOGs. Thanks to Supremacy Claus for a great turn of phrase and the WOG Squad for spreading the links to these posts. The images used in this post do not come from the Post Falls Little League.