David Wayne Fish makes a personal pledge: one season, one sport, no missed games

California, USA, Sep 22, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — David Wayne Fish is putting a specific commitment on the record. With six kids moving through baseball, football, and tennis across overlapping seasons, he says the easiest thing to let slip is presence. So he is naming the standard out loud.

“If one of my kids has a game or a practice, someone from this family is there,” Fish says. “That’s the whole pledge. It sounds simple because it should be simple. The hard part is building a life where you can actually keep it.”

Fish runs healthcare and wellness companies as a consultant and CEO, work that does not pause for a Tuesday scrimmage. He is not pretending otherwise. The pledge is not about having endless free time. It is about deciding in advance what wins when a calendar conflict shows up.

Why he is saying it publicly

Fish has coached football, baseball, and helped organize tennis for years. He says most parents do not fail their kids through some dramatic absence. They fail them through a hundred small ones that never get flagged as decisions at all.

“Nobody skips a game and thinks of it as a broken promise,” he says. “It just looks like a scheduling problem. I wanted to write my own rule down so it stops being negotiable case by case.”

He credits his own father, and the model of family life he grew up with in Michigan, for the instinct behind this. Fish says he was raised around the idea that a father’s job includes showing up, not just providing.

What the commitment actually covers

The pledge Fish is making has a few concrete parts:

Every game gets a family face in the stands. Not every game gets David personally, with six kids and overlapping seasons that is not realistic, but every game gets someone: him, his wife, or another family member who can stand in.

Coaching commitments get finished, not started. Fish says he does not sign up to coach a season and then quietly hand it off when work gets busy. If he takes a team, he finishes the season.

Conflicts get resolved before the week starts, not during it. Fish says he sits down weekly and maps which kid has what, so trade-offs get made on a Sunday with a clear head instead of on a Wednesday in a parking lot.

“I’d rather lose an hour on Sunday mapping the week than lose a moment at my kid’s game because I’m distracted by something I should have planned around,” he says.

What he is asking of himself, not other parents

Fish is careful to frame this as his own standard, not a lecture. He is not telling other families how to run their weeks.

“I’m not in a position to tell another parent what their life allows,” he says. “I know what mine allows, and I know where I’ve cut corners before without meaning to. This is me closing that gap for myself.”

He says the pledge will get tested immediately, since his kids’ seasons rarely line up cleanly. Two games at the same hour, in two different towns, is not a hypothetical for his family. It happens.

“When that comes up, the answer isn’t ‘we’ll figure it out.’ The answer is already written down: someone from this family goes to each one,” Fish says. “I’d rather have made that call in October than try to make it in the car in March.”

Holding himself to it

Fish says he plans to track the pledge the same plain way he tracks anything else he takes seriously: a simple log of games, and who from the family was there. No app, no public scoreboard, just a habit he intends to keep himself honest about.

“If I say I’m going to do something for my kids, I want a way to check whether I actually did it,” he says. “That’s the only accountability that’s ever mattered to me.”

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About David Wayne Fish

David Wayne Fish is an entrepreneur based in Laguna Niguel, California. He works as a CEO and consultant to healthcare and wellness companies. Outside that work, he coaches youth football and baseball, helps organize tennis programs, and is the father of six children active in sports.