Brian Out Loud Archive

If you are looking for the strongest girls weightlifting in the state, look no further than right here in Northwest Florida.

Those aren’t just words in a column either. It’s fact.

I can remember shooting baskets for hours in the humid summer months and even, at times, the brutally cold winter months on the basketball court in the driveway back home.

You are talking to someone here who used to chip ice off that old court just so my friends and I could play, and once, we even walked in a snowstorm down to the community center to play ball.

Welcome to 2024.

The ball dropped on New Year’s Eve in Times Square a few days ago.

Dear Santa, the FHSAA could use a clue.


I know it’s a big ask. Perhaps a bigger ask than that time when I was 8 and I circled every toy in one of those old department store catalogs hoping for the best on Christmas morning.

It starts with Dear Argos, Dear Bulldogs, Dear Gators or Dear whatever other school nickname you want to fill in the blank with.

And then in it goes into thanking teammates, thanking coaches, thanking fans and, heck, maybe sometimes they even thank the training staff or the water boy.

You killed my dream Texas A&M.

Just when I thought I’d be the next head coach of the Aggies and looked forward to a future of one day being the guy who would get paid millions of dollars to do nothing, Texas A&M goes ahead and hires Duke head coach Mike Elko.

Next month will mark four years since the University of West Florida football team last won an NCAA Division II national championship.

There was always an appreciation for that title run as it happened, as well as an appreciation for the journey it took to get to the top of the mountain.

I don’t think anyone needs to be told the NFL is a tough, often cruel business. And sometimes it’s a crazy business.

In the span of not even 24 hours last week, Navarre alum Michael Carter went from the New York Jets to the Arizona Cardinals.

Give Navarre’s football team credit in 2023. A lot of it.

The Raiders were in a tough spot early on in the season, dropping their first two games. Hope was fading fast, at least to those on the outside looking in.

As a young boy, when you see a basketball coach throw a chair onto the court during a game while watching on television, it kind of turns out to be the thing that you remember the most about said coach.

That coach happened to be Bobby Knight, one of the most famous in all of basketball history.