Crestview High School held its commencement ceremony last Friday night and another school year is in the books. The 2022-2023 school year was my first full year of covering high school sports since the 2014-15 school year and it was great. It doesn’t take me long to bond with athletes and my heart is full while somewhat sad as I watch another class go into the world.

There are very few blackhole times of year when covering high school sports when things disappear into a vacuum of sorts. The months of June and July are the closest thing we have to a blackhole. The two months between the end of the school year and the start of fall practices are when things slow to a crawl. It’s a time to catch up on other sports news in the community.

Baseball Hall of Fame catcher Roy Campanella said of baseball, “You have to love it like a boy and play it like a man.” I thought about that quote recently as I took a few minutes to watch youth league baseball at Baker as I waited for the varsity game to start.

I’ve always been fascinated by mascots and how schools went about deciding their mascot. Look around Northwest Florida and you will see everything ranging from Raiders at Northwest Florida State College and Navarre High School to Vikings at Fort Walton Beach High School.

It has long been said that the two favorite sports in the Deep South are football and spring football. And while we have to wait another four months or so for high school football season to start in the fall, spring football is upon us.

It’s hard to believe we are in the home stretch of the school year. The boys district weightlifting tournaments were last week. District tournaments in the spring sports will continue through April and end with the baseball and softball district tournaments May 1-4.

I am competitive by nature. I make no apologies for that. I don’t understand why any athlete would put in the hard work required to compete and not want to win. I don’t understand why people in any walk of life don’t want to be the best in their profession.

I am a Roger Maris fan. I’m so much a Roger Maris fan that when I was 9 years old, I bought a 34-ounce Roger Maris model baseball bat, which was much too heavy for me to actually swing at that age. Most people are familiar with the name of Roger Maris. Most even know that in 1961 he hit 61 home runs to break the record of 60 homers set in 1927. Many of you will know that for 30 years an asterisk was next to the record.

Much has been written by the national press about Detroit Mercy basketball player Antoine Davis approaching the National Collegiate Athletic Association career scoring record held by Pete Maravich. Davis, who has played five years of varsity basketball at Mercy, came up three points shy of tying the career scoring record of 3,667 set by Maravich while playing for LSU from 1967-1970. That’s three seasons that Maravich played compared to the five Davis played.

As many of you may already know, my gallbladder surgery scheduled for Feb. 20 was postponed due to concerns of the anesthesiologist. There are worries that I might possibly have something going on with my heart. I know many of you are questioning if I even have a heart. I raised that point to the doctors, but they didn’t buy it.