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.
They wear black and white striped shirts. They throw flags and blow their whistles. And boy do they take a ton of heat.
The life of an official for a sporting event, especially a high school sporting event, is not an easy one.
Chasing competitive balance is a loss cause. It’s like running a cross-country race and never getting to the finish line. Or chasing that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You won’t ever find it.
And yet, as usual, our high school association in the state of Florida likes to change the playoff format more than it changes socks.
When I saw the news that Georgia had approved NIL for high school athletes, my immediate thought was Florida has to be next.
I know the Sunshine State has long opposed moving into the world of NIL for high school athletes, but with a neighboring state opting to go all in, the pressure is really on for Florida to do the same.
Football is an emotional game and sometimes that emotion gets the best of an athlete.
I’ve seen it happen in practices countless times in my career, often to the point where full on fights have broken out between teammates, and sometimes, tensions rise among a team as well.
Sometimes I forget how small the world is.
Then you get reminded of that as a nurse makes small talk while poking an IV needle into your arm in preparation for a procedure. Nothing major. I’m still alive. I mean, I wrote this column didn’t I?
Indiana Hoosier football coach Tom Allen went and fired off a post-game rant earlier this month about how Friday night lights should be reserved for high school football and nothing else.
