The tremendous support of the Venice community is one reason why this craft festival is so successful! Located on Florida’s west coast, Venice is a vibrant town on the Gulf of Mexico, filled with historic charm, natural beauty, and independently owned shops and restaurants.
Presented by Howard Alan Events in partnership with Venice MainStreet.
NORTH PORT — The city’s portion of Sarasota County’s Legacy Trail breaks ground Monday.
North Port’s Legacy Trail Connector will be nearly 4 miles of paved trails. Two other routes in North Port are planned: The South Powerline, which is an improved shell-packed road, and a more natural trail surface through Deer Prairie Creek Preserve.
The North Port package of trails is part of Sarasota County’s Legacy Trail, a $65 million project funded in a 2018 voter referendum. Some 400,000 annual users reportedly use the Legacy Trail that connects Sarasota, Osprey, Nokomis, Venice and South Venice.
The trail is a wide, smoothly paved path for walkers/joggers, rollerbladers and bicyclists. There are trailheads, parking areas and seating along differing route distances.
North Port’s Connector is “one of the most exciting things as a parks director,” said Nicole Rissler, executive director with Sarasota County Parks, Recreation and Natural Resources.
The bigger picture is linking Florida in a so-called rails-to-trails movement of walking and biking trails. Many of those trails are converted rail lines, hundreds of miles criss-crossing the state, linking cities, providing transportation alternatives, drawing visitors and boosting eco-tourism.
A North Port Connector will run nearly 4 miles of paved pathways along the Deer Prairie Creek Preserve, “where one can go to experience native habitats, including pine flatwoods, prairie hammocks, and seasonal wetlands,” according to information on the Friends of Legacy Trail website. That nonprofit was started in 2016 to further The Legacy Trail, a Sarasota County park.
“Once the connector gets to North Port, it’ll be a wonderful asset to our community here,” Friends of the Legacy Trail-North Port coordinator Sharon Donovan had said.
The Legacy Trail's North Port Connector ground-breaking is scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday at 1045 Calera St., at the end of West Price Boulevard.
Those three connections are:
• Powerline Trail, connecting Border Road through the Carlton Reserve and Big Slough Preserves to Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park.
• Deer Prairie Creek Route, connecting the east end of Forbes Trail to the south entrance of Deer Prairie Creek. That starts Monday.
• Schewe Route running along Interstate 75 before turning south and eventually connecting with Warm Mineral Springs. North Port city commissioners this month approved a $9.2 million upgrade package at the Springs with the Legacy Trail as a future component.
“A different experience in different parts” of the Trail, Rissler said. “Everybody’s super excited.”
Sarasota County’s original Legacy Trail dates to around 2004. The county bought a former railroad corridor for about $12 million. That 12.5-mile project runs from Sarasota to Venice. It is popular with walkers, bikers, inline skaters and others; so popular, in fact, that devices had been added along the trail to count daily users.
Trail use in the last year had exploded, Donovan said, “indicating a great interest in outdoor recreation, especially during the pandemic, when people are looking for safe things to do.”
North Port’s mayor had long pushed for a connecting trail to the city, in her time having covered “every inch” of the Legacy Trail, riding, rollerblading and walking it, Mayor Jill Luke said.
“It’s outdoors, it’s nature,” she said. “I love it.”
North Port Connector ground-breaking is scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday at 1045 Calera St., at the end of West Price Boulevard.
Pet Advocates Working in the Suncoast Child Protection Center is celebrating it's 10th Anniversary.
SARASOTA - The Children Protection Center is celebrating a decade of its program Pet Advocates Working in the Suncoast.
Known as P.A.W.S., it uses "nationally certified pet therapy dogs whose handlers are volunteers who have received training on mandatory reporting of child abuse and dynamics that surround child sexual abuse," it said in an email.
"P.A.W.S. dogs have been utilized in the following capacity: stress relief for clients and staff, the State Attorney’s Office for pre-filing interviews, depositions and trial, YMCA Youth Shelter, Ringling College students, state and national presentations with the Florida Network of Children’s Advocacy Center and the National Child Protection Training Center."
It was founded by Danielle Hughes.
Hughes is a team coordinator of the Child Protection Team and 2020’s Child Advocate of the Year. Her dog, Harley Duke, inspired the program "to benefit children in the traumatic and stressful situations that occur after child abuse," the email noted.
For more information about assisting the Child Protection Center, contact Sheila Miller 941-365-1277 Ext. 111
The Cry’n Shames provide music for revelers at the Myakka River United Way event at Snook Haven in October 2018. They will perform back in Venice this month as MainStreet gets its first concert since March.
SUN PHOTO BY AUDREY BLACKWELL
VENICE — The Venice MainStreet Friday Night Concert series resumes in Centennial Park on Nov. 13 after an eight-month hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic.
If all goes well, Assistant City Manager Len Bramble said, the city could consider adding more, perhaps larger, special events and residents might get “a semblance of holiday seasons past.”
“We love our special events,” he said.
And if it doesn’t — worst-case scenario, someone gets sick from exposure at the concert — “it would have a disastrous effect on the continuation of special events right now,” he said.
“The success of future events is all in the hands of those who attend,” Bramble said.
Maybe not entirely. He acknowledged that the COVID-19 numbers “aren’t real favorable right now.”
Almost all of the special events in the city from March onward fell victim to a moratorium imposed by an executive order issued in March and renewed in July by City Manager Ed Lavallee.
But he announced at a recent City Council meeting that discussions with Venice MainStreet were underway to create a “re-entry program” for special events.
It’s taking the form of a three-concert series, said Nick Sperry, VMS Events and Partnership coordinator.
The concert next week features popular local band the Cry’n Shames. Another concert is scheduled for Nov. 27, he said, and a special one on Dec. 11 for the holidays before a break until January.
Although that’s VMS’ usual schedule, much else is different, starting with the need for people to register to attend even though admission is free.
Sperry said that there’s a limited number of tickets but didn’t disclose how many. Bramble said the city’s cap is about 150 but it may be a little flexible depending on the response.
“I believe it’s going to fill up,” Sperry said.
There may be a pent-up demand for entertainment. He said he went from scheduling “54 events a year to nothing.”
The same thing happened with his own performance schedule as a musician,he said, with gigs just starting to come back.
Concert attendees will be required to wear a mask, he said, and stay in squares marked off about 10 feet apart for groups up to six people.
The concert space will have a “soft” perimeter, according to Bramble, who said VMS is also required to provide signs and sanitation stations as part of its COVID-19 plan.
VMS will be following these precautions until the city lifts them, Sperry said.
“We really hope that people are respectful,” Bramble said. “All it takes is one or two bad apples to spoil it for everybody....We don’t want that to happen.”
Even though the season didn’t end the way we hoped, the Atlanta Braves have nothing to be ashamed of from their 2020 season.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find another team that suffered more significant injuries and setbacks as the Atlanta Braves did in 2020.
It’s been well documented how only one of the five starting pitchers they envisioned being in the starting rotation made it to the postseason.
Once Mike Soroka went down I felt like this team had no shot in the postseason.
And yet guys like Ian Anderson, Kyle Wright, and Bryse Wilson stepped up to give us huge starts in the postseason.
Not only that, but they gave us a glimpse of what this team could look like at full strength in the future.
If the Braves go into the postseason next year with a healthy rotation of Soroka, Fried, Anderson, and Wright I feel really confident about our chances of winning a World Series.
But it wasn’t just the pitching that the Braves had to battle through this season, they played the majority of the regular season with two of their best players battling wrist injuries in Ronald Acuna Jr. and Ozzie Albies.
As we know from Freddie Freeman in the past, the only way you fully recover from that injury is with a lot of rest. The season didn’t afford that for them, and I feel pretty confident in saying that Acuna’s wrist was hurting a lot more than he was letting on in the postseason.
And our offense is just not the same when Acuna isn’t getting on base, and he just wasn’t able to do that enough in the last three games of the NLCS.
Yes, these are excuses. And yes it hurts to blow a 3-1 lead.
But if we’re being honest, the Dodgers were just a better team and they proved that by beating us three games in a row.
The one thing that I hope the Braves take away from this series is the offensive approach of the Dodgers in the postseason.
It was pretty clear the Braves hitters were just trying to hit home runs every time they went up, and that type of offense just doesn’t work against good pitching in the postseason.
Yes, the Dodgers hit their fair share of home runs, but it’s how they did it that was so impressive. The deciding home runs from Kike Hernandez and Cody Bellinger both came at the end of long at-bats after they fouled off some tough pitches.
The Braves hitters just don’t battle like that. There were too many times in those last three games were they got out in the first three pitches of an at-bat.
Hopefully they learn from that and their philosophy changes a bit next season.
But overall, with everything this team went through in 2020, to push the best team in baseball to a game seven in the NLCS was really impressive.
I know Braves fans are tired of hearing the “next year” statement, and so am I. But the fact is, this team is still very young and will have plenty of more chances in the coming years.
But overall, with everything this team went through in 2020, to push the best team in baseball to a game seven in the NLCS was really impressive.
We look back at the history of the Braves franchise and focus in on one of the best offensive seasons in the team's history.
How many of you knew Rogers Hornsby played for the Braves? If you raised your hand, put it down, no one cares.
But if you did know, then you knew more about Braves baseball in the 20s than me. I had no clue until this morning when I started researching a historical article to write that the famous Rogers Hornsby spent time in the Braves organization.
Not only that, but in his one season with the Braves he put up the best offensive season in team historys, if you go by OWAR on Baseball Reference.
In that 1928 season with the Boston Braves, he put up an OWAR of 10.2, which again, does rank as the highest of all-time for any Braves player according to BR.
If you look at the counting numbers, they don't exactly pop out at you. He scored 99 runs, had 188 hits, 42 doubles, 7 triples, 21 home runs, 94 RBI, and stole five bags.
But then again, he also played in just 140 games that season.
However, his slashline was ridiculous at .387/.498/.632 with a 1.130 OPS.
This will be hard to believe considering the game we watch today, but he walked 107 times that season and struck out just 41 times.
Man would I love to see those days again -- not the walks, but the low number of strikeouts.
Despite having the greatest OWAR season in the history of the franchise, he finished just 13th in the MVP voting.
That probably had more to do with the fact that the Braves were 50-103 that season and he played in fewer games.
After the 1928 season he was traded to the Chicago Cubs for Bruce Cunningham, Percy Jones, Lou Legett, Freddie Maguire, Socks Seibold, and $200,000.
Remember any of those players? Probably not.
And of course, the next season Hornsby wins his second MVP award slashing .380/.459/.679 with 156 runs (156!), 47 doubles, 39 home runs, and 149 RBI.
His Cubs team that year finished first in the National League, but lost to the Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series.
I hope you all enjoyed this trip down memory lane. We'll probably be doing this a lot more often as we wait for baseball to resume.
