It happens every year. Student athletes and their family and friends fill cafeterias, gymnasiums, media centers, and sometimes even offsite locations, to sign national letters of intent.
It happened again last Wednesday, here in Santa Rosa County, throughout the state and across the country.
In the middle of its celebration last Tuesday night, members of the Navarre Raider girls soccer team paused their enjoyment of the moment to console a heartbroken Pace Patriot team.
The Raiders didn’t have to do it. They could have carried on with their celebration, savoring the 2-0 victory they earned in a hard-fought game on a cool January evening at the Ashton Brosnaham Complex in Pensacola.
When the new high school in the south end of Santa Rosa County opens its doors to students for the first time in 2026, it will be three floors, have 74 classrooms, CTE labs, a gym, a sports field house and athletic fields. It will have the capacity for 1,800 students.
What it won’t have are two things that would have benefitted high school athletics in this area in a big-time way. I’m talking about a swimming pool and a track with a rubberized surface.
#Respectmydecision. That’s the hashtag that has become quite popular on social media when an athlete announces he or she is decommitting or transferring to another school.
Typically, you only see it in football. In the end, it’s one of those things that shouldn’t have to accompany a decision.
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.
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.
