Tony Chiado

Sports have always been an important part of my life. As a kid, it felt like my life revolved around them. Baseball and football were constantly on my mind and I strove to intimately know the technical and strategic parts of the game. I played middle infield in baseball and quarterback in football (admittedly in a run heavy offense). On both teams, I was a leader, I like to think, by example as much as word or title. As my playing days drew to an end, I found other ways to stoke that flame.

In college, I wrote about the Seattle Seahawks for a number of blogs. It was an exciting time during the height of the Pete Carroll era in Seattle. That faded away as I began coaching baseball, though. I was an assistant Varsity baseball coach for the Bush School in 2017 before focusing on my graduate studies. During that season, Bush made the playoffs for the first time in school history. When I began teaching at Metro Academic and Classical High School, I had intended to focus solely on my teaching ambitions, but was quickly, and easily, pulled back onto the diamond by a group of young men that led the baseball program there. From 2021-2023, I served as the head coach of the Varsity baseball team. During that time, the team went to the playoffs all three years while winning its biggest playoff game in school history in year two. Regardless of what the future holds for coaching, those few years when Spring emerged to thaw the Midwest clay will always be some of my favorite experiences on the field. Those years were magical.

I love watching sports from local high school games to my alma-mater University of Washington Huskies Football, Mariners, Seahawks, Cardinals, and Blues. I was young during that 2001 Mariners run and suffered through two decades of club struggles. The Huskies went 0-12 during my sister’s first year on UW’s campus. But it was during my first year at UW that the Seahawks realized the pinnacle, and all felt right in Seattle sports. My first year in Saint Louis, I fell in love with Hockey and watched the Blues win their first Stanley Cup (to this day I am a Blues fan over the Kraken). I also watched Yadier Molina launch his bat on a walk-off in the playoffs (the first MLB playoff win I would experience in person). When I moved back to Seattle in 2023, I immediately bought season tickets for the Huskies, and what a ride that was. 13-0 in season play, we flew to New Orleans for an unforgettable Sugar Bowl before everything collapsed the next week.

So here, I write from time to time about the wonderful experiences sports gifts, as a player, coach, supporter.