Opinion Archive

Crestview High School and Baker School now have their new head football coaches. In reality, the searches ended right where they started.

Both schools already had their head coaches on staff, one might even suggest that Thomas Grant had been groomed for the Crestview job and Barry Gardner for the Baker job.

I had the opportunity to sit down with our U.S. House Representative, Matt Gaetz, at his district office in Pensacola last week. He was preparing for a hearing with Alejandro Mayorkas last Thursday and took an hour out of his day to chat about his district that covers all the areas where we have news organizations.

I am a sports guy. I played youth league sports as a kid and in high school I was a member of the football and track teams at Gulf Breeze.

That’s not to say I didn’t have interest in other things. I sang in a youth choir and I was a member of the Gulf Breeze High chorus my freshman year.

We applaud the Crestview City Council’s embrace of our newest federal holiday, Juneteenth National Independence Day – and pray this joyous observance isn’t contaminated by politics.

Murphy’s Law was hitting me from every side Thursday night. If you aren’t familiar with Murphy’s Law, it states, “If it can go wrong it will, and at the worst possible time.”

And honestly, there wasn’t a worse time for things to go wrong as I prepared to cover my first high school basketball game in six years. 

But change is constant, even sneaky, and often surprises us. Peering around corners doesn’t protect us from the future; it only steals the present.

National signing day has come and gone and once again there is no shortage of talent. Navarre, Pace, Milton, Crestview. All have athletes who are headed to the next level.

That chance to play a college sport is a dream for every athlete. Heck, I used to have that dream. I just didn’t have the talent to match it.

We are hiring staff. We are publishing once a week instead of twice. We will continue to use the U.S. Postal Service for delivery. We print the papers on Tuesday, deliver them to stores and the post office on Wednesday and you should get them on Thursday.

I’ll never forget March 24, 2016. That day forever change my life when, without warning, I lost my job as the sports editor of the News Bulletin.

I’m not ashamed to say I cried a lot that day. I cried for myself and for the athletes.

At the start of each year the City of Crestview chooses a theme, a slogan, and a logo to embrace in the new year. This tradition began in 2019, as we transitioned to a new administration. The theme that year was “A New View for Crestview.” In 2020, the theme was “A Community Coming Together” which turned out to be very prophetic because Covid did bring the City of Crestview together. Last year, we used our experiences to transition into the theme “Raising the Bar.”