Brian Out Loud Archive

We made it everyone. The curtain has been lowered on the 2020-21 high school sports season.

Normally, the end of the season isn’t a cause for celebration, but this one is different.

Navarre athletic director Scott Murphy has told me the story before about the time the Raiders were at the state softball tournament and someone mispronounced Navarre while also wondering where the heck the town was in Florida.

That was more than a decade ago.

I’ve never been one to put a lot of stock into rankings, be it preseason, in-season or postseason. They have as much value as the lint in my pocket. Maybe less.

Apparently, rankings mean even less than I first thought based on how the Region 1-2A bracket was set up for flag football.

It’s the summer of 2015. It’s hot and humid. The sun is unforgiving as it bakes the football practice field behind Bennett C. Russell Stadium.

I’m here to watch the Raiders put in work at one of their trademark intense summer workouts, and my focus is locked in on two players in particular. Michael Carter and Thomas Leggett.

Once upon a time, flag football at Navarre was merely a dream. The closest players came to it was the annual powder puff game between the girls in the junior and senior classes.

Things have changed. The dream has become a reality as Navarre has made a name for itself in the sport.
It doesn’t surprise me. It shouldn’t surprise you either.

Major League Baseball tends to stick to tradition. It doesn’t embrace change the way other pro sports do, sometimes avoiding it like a plague.

That is until two weeks ago when commissioner Rob Manfred dropped the hammer on Atlanta by pulling the 2021 All-Star Game out of the city.

My dog got a hold of my press pass the other day and brought it to his pit of death, which is a cooler term for under the dining room table.

He put a few bite marks into it, but luckily, the pass lives on, which means more opportunities are on the horizon for me in the world of covering sports.

Millions of fans from around the nation are soaking in the excitement of the madness of March.

And you can’t blame them. The NCAA tournament is three weeks of win-or-go home basketball, with joy and heartbreak and everything in between all rolled into one.

Maybe it was the fact that it had been nearly 15 months since that memorable night in Texas ended with the University of West Florida football team winning its first NCAA Division II national title in program history.

Or maybe it was just as simple as the sun was shining and it was a picture-perfect day for college football at Pen Air Field.

All too often decisions made by the Florida High School Athletic Association make little sense.
This time, the state did the right thing.

It was announced Monday that the FHSAA has officially wrapped up the reclassification process, and it did so in sprinter-like fashion.