Brian Out Loud Archive

No finger pointing. No excuses.

Navarre’s football team wasn’t playing the blame game after its crushing loss to one of its biggest rivals in the Beach Bowl two weeks ago.

Dansby Swanson sat in a dugout on one of those hot and humid summer afternoons here in Florida that leaves you feeling as if the planet is on fire.

It was 2016 and Swanson was in town with the Mississippi Braves for their series against the Pensacola Blue Wahoos. Prior to one of the games that week, the highly touted Braves prospect was made available to the media.

Must-win game. It’s all I wrote about and talked about when it came to the Navarre football team in the days leading up to its District 1-7A finale against Crestview last Friday night.

It might have been said and written more times than Merry Christmas is in December.

Glory doesn’t come easy in sports. It takes hard work and patience. Determination and a little luck never hurt either.

The Navarre Raider volleyball team understood as much heading into the 2021 season. The players knew back in the summer if they were going to take a trip on the road to glory, they were going to have to embrace every high and low along the way.

Winning was the only option for the Navarre Raider football team on Friday night.

Anything less than victory over Pace simply wouldn’t have been good enough. Not with the Raiders sitting three spots below the Patriots in the latest regional rankings.

We live in an interesting country, one that picks and chooses when it wants to hear what athletes have to say about a relevant topic.

We know that if the opinion of the athlete fits their belief or narrative, or if it doesn’t make them uncomfortable, people are quick to buy tickets for that bandwagon.

It’s a beautiful Monday afternoon. The sun is shining. No rain threat in sight. Playing golf at the Club at Hidden Creek seems like a great idea for the Navarre golf teams as they head into another week.

That great idea, however, might as well not be an idea at all because the Raiders have no chance of playing golf on this day in late September.

Sometimes I scratch my head when it comes to great athletes that just don’t seem to be getting the recruiting looks that they should be late in their high school careers.

Navarre’s Devin Wright is one of them.

Some things never change in college football.

Alabama keeps winning. Florida State can’t get itself right.

Loss. Loss. Loss. Loss.

It is kind of a dreary start to a column but it’s a simple way of stating that the beginning of the 2018 volleyball season, Ryan Davenport’s first as the head coach, did not start off well.