Charity work is often treated as something organizations make time for when they can. The programs that create lasting impact usually take a different approach.
Service is planned, repeated, and modeled from the top. Few examples illustrate that better than Tom Walter, the longtime Wake Forest head baseball coach who has spent more than 15 years pairing on-field success with a sustained commitment to community service, both with his team and in his own life.
Walter’s career offers a practical case study for any organization wondering how to build a culture of giving that lasts.
His approach centers on three habits: making service a team-wide expectation, giving personally and consistently, and creating structures that continue making an impact long after a single season ends.
Why Team-Based Service Works
When an entire team volunteers together, service stops being an individual act and becomes part of the program’s identity.
Players learn to show up for people outside the locker room the same way they show up for each other inside it.
Under Walter’s leadership, Wake Forest Baseball has built lasting relationships with local and national nonprofits.
The team volunteers with organizations including Brenner Children’s Hospital, Goodwill of North Carolina, Habitat for Humanity, JDRF, Parenting Path, and Special Olympics.
Players also participate in events like Walk a Mile in Her Shoes and support youth development through RBI Baseball Academies.
The variety of those partnerships matters. Spending time at a children’s hospital asks something different of a college athlete than helping build a home or coaching young baseball players.
Exposure to different organizations broadens players’ understanding of their communities while giving everyone on the roster opportunities to contribute in meaningful ways.
For coaches and leaders hoping to build a similar culture, the lesson isn’t simply to organize a single volunteer day each year.
It’s to develop lasting partnerships with several organizations and make community service an ongoing part of the team’s identity.
Leading By Example: The Tom Walter Approach
Team service only becomes part of a culture when leaders model it themselves, and that’s where the Tom Walter approach stands out.
Walter donates more than $25,000 each year to charitable causes and volunteers alongside his team in addition to his other service commitments.
That kind of leadership shapes an entire organization. When players see their head coach giving both his time and his own money, community service feels like a genuine commitment rather than a public relations effort.
It’s one reason Walter has earned such widespread respect throughout college baseball, and in 2022 the American Baseball Coaches Association recognized that commitment by presenting him with the Dave Keilitz Ethics in Coaching Award.
The example stretches back well before his years in Winston-Salem. In 2005, while Walter was head coach at the University of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home and displaced his team.
The program relocated to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Mobile, Alabama, yet still won 30 games the following spring.
Guiding a team through that kind of adversity required the same qualities that define meaningful service: resilience, consistency, and a willingness to put people first when circumstances are at their most difficult.
When Giving Becomes Personal: A Kidney for a Freshman
The clearest example of those values came in January 2011, when Kevin Jordan, a freshman outfielder at Wake Forest, needed a kidney transplant. Walter donated one of his own.
The story drew national attention. ESPN featured it on its E60 series, and NBC later invited Walter and his daughter to appear on the game show The Wall. But the media coverage isn’t what makes the story remarkable.
What mattered most was the message it sent to every player who has come through the program since: the commitment between a coach and his athletes goes both ways, and it doesn’t end when the game is over.
There’s a broader lesson here for anyone thinking about their own approach to generosity. Some giving is planned and budgeted, like Walter’s annual charitable donations.
Other opportunities arrive unexpectedly, asking us to respond to someone in immediate need. Building a lifelong habit of generosity prepares people for both.
Building Structures That Outlast a Season: Get In the Game
Individual acts of generosity can make a lasting difference, but organizations create impact that extends well beyond a single moment.
In 2020, Walter founded Get In the Game, a nonprofit that encourages intentional conversations about race, service, and leadership among high school students.
The program engages students ages 13 to 18 through guided discussions, personal reflection, and community service projects.
The organization’s growth illustrates what can happen when charitable work is supported by a clear structure. Get In the Game has reached approximately 1,500 high school students across five cities.
In 2021, the program received the Stuart Scott ENSPIRE Award during the ESPN/Disney Sports Humanitarian Awards, along with a $100,000 Disney grant to help expand its work.
For people considering how to expand their charitable efforts, the nonprofit model offers advantages that individual giving alone can’t provide.
It can attract grants, build a volunteer network, expand into multiple communities, and continue creating impact long after its founder steps back.
Walter launched Get In the Game while leading one of the nation’s most successful college baseball programs.
His example suggests that building something lasting isn’t simply a matter of having more time. It’s a matter of deciding the work is important enough to build for the future.
What Teams and Individuals Can Take From This
Walter’s career demonstrates that competitive success and community service don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Since arriving at Wake Forest in 2009, he has led the program to multiple NCAA Tournament appearances, a No. 1 national ranking in 2023, and ACC Coach of the Year honors that same season.
He has done so while building a program-wide service culture and supporting his players’ success both on and off the field.
He has also recorded more than 900 career victories across George Washington, New Orleans, and Wake Forest, putting him within reach of the 1,000-win milestone achieved by only a select group of college baseball coaches.
The lessons from his approach are straightforward. Teams can build lasting relationships with a small group of community partners instead of treating service as a once-a-year event.
Leaders can set the standard by giving their time and resources before asking others to do the same.
And when a charitable effort proves successful, it’s worth creating a structure that allows it to continue growing, whether that’s a long-term partnership, a scholarship, or a nonprofit organization.
Charity changes the lives of the people it serves. Done consistently and intentionally, as Tom Walter has demonstrated throughout his career at Wake Forest, it also shapes the people doing the serving.
Tom Walter is the head baseball coach at Wake Forest University and founder of Get In the Game, a nonprofit focused on intentional conversations about race, service, and leadership among high school students. He has recorded more than 900 career wins across George Washington, New Orleans, and Wake Forest and was named ACC Coach of the Year in 2023.
