Brian Out Loud Archive

Father’s Day hits differently when your dad is no longer with you.

I lost my dad last spring, and this will be the second year in a row where I won’t be able to call him, send him a card or take a trip home to see him like I did four years ago, which happened to be the last Father’s Day weekend we spent together.

More basketball courts. That’s what Navarre needs.

Not more Dollar Generals. Not more storage units. Not more gas stations. We have enough of those.

It was the middle of March. The day of my birthday to be exact. And the Navarre Raider softball team won a game that kind of sent a message that it was on its way to having a pretty good year.

I was there to witness the Raiders hammer Niceville 16-6. The same Eagles who have long been a thorn in the side of Navarre over the years. Until that night, the Raiders had never beaten the Eagles in run-rule fashion.

Rewind to the spring sports season in 2020. It seems like a lifetime ago in some ways because of how different the world was then in the midst of a pandemic.

The current seniors who will receive their high school diplomas this week were only freshmen at the time. Their spring seasons were cut short just a few weeks in.

I made a donation to a GoFundMe for one of the local teams traveling to a regional tournament game last week.

I have nothing against giving to a good cause. It beats sending money to some random person who emails you asking for money so that he or she can get off an island they are stuck on in the middle of nowhere.

I’ll never pretend to be an expert when it comes to movie reviews.

But if you haven’t seen “Air” yet, it’s worth the price of admission.

Five wins. That’s what Navarre finished the year with in 2022.

The Raiders were at eight wins going into the final week of the regular season, and based on that alone, you have to say there has been improvement.

I’ve said it about the girls when it comes to weightlifting, and the same can be said about the boys.

When it comes to this corner of Northwest Florida, the athletes here dominate the sport.

It’s a start. That was my initial thought when I learned that Santa Rosa County is dipping its toes into the middle school sports game.

Starting this coming school year, the county will finally offer what we’ll call an appetizer menu of sports for junior high athletes. Cross-country, track and 3-on-3 basketball are the options those athletes will have an opportunity to compete in.

I’m going to say for 364 days of the year, most of America could care less about women’s college basketball.

Most of America doesn’t put it on its list of sports to watch on a Tuesday night in late January and no one is racing to fill out women’s basketball brackets for an office pool.