Latest news with #Bartow
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Yahoo
Sheriff Grady Judd: 'Violent death' at group home prompts murder investigation
The Brief Sheriff Grady Judd says that a "violent death" at a group home has prompted a murder investigation in Bartow. First responders found the victim, an 81-year-old white man, dead this morning at an independent group living home owned by ET Care. Judd says they will release more information on Monday. BARTOW, Fla. - Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd says that his office is helping the Bartow Police Department investigate what they are calling a "violent death." What we know First responders found the victim, an 81-year-old white man, dead this morning at an independent group living home. Three other people lived in the group home that is owned by ET Care. Judd says that the man was last seen on Saturday evening. READ: Riverview High School teacher arrested for having sexual relations with student: HCSO What we don't know No other information has been released and Sheriff Grady Judd says they will release more information on Monday. CLICK HERE:>>>Follow FOX 13 on YouTube The Source Information for this story was provided by Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. STAY CONNECTED WITH FOX 13 TAMPA: Download the FOX Local app for your smart TV Download FOX Local mobile app: Apple | Android Download the FOX 13 News app for breaking news alerts, latest headlines Download the SkyTower Radar app Sign up for FOX 13's daily newsletter
Fox News
13-05-2025
- Sport
- Fox News
Ex-NFL linebacker Adarius Taylor arrested on child abuse charge, records show
Print Close By Ryan Gaydos Published May 13, 2025 Former NFL linebacker Adarius Taylor was arrested on a child abuse charge last week in Florida, jail records showed. Taylor was booked into the Polk County Jail on Thursday and was charged with negligent child abuse without bodily harm and soliciting another for prostitution, lewdness or assignation. CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON Taylor's bail was set for $6,000. He was released from jail on Sunday. He is set to be arraigned on June 10, according to online records. Details of the arrest were not immediately made available. The 34-year-old Bartow, Florida, native played college football at Eastern Arizona and Florida Atlantic before he got a chance to compete in the NFL. CHIEFS SUPERFAN 'CHIEFSAHOLIC' SENTENCED TO 32 YEARS IN OKLAHOMA PRISON He joined the Carolina Panthers in 2014 as an undrafted free agent. He had two stints with the Panthers – the second in 2020. In between, he had time with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Cleveland Browns. He tried to latch on to the Canadian Football League's Calgary Stampeders in 2023 but only lasted until November of that year. Taylor was originally born as Adarius Glanton before he changed his last name in 2018. He said at the time he wanted to change his last name before he got married. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP He appeared in 88 games, recorded 140 tackles and had two sacks during his career. Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter . Print Close URL
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Yahoo
Bartow coffee shop launching free coffee campaign for first responders' weeks after recent shootout
The Brief A Bartow coffee shop is launching a free coffee campaign for first responders, weeks after a recent shootout. At Banker's Brew, there are still remnants of a shootout that occurred between a suspect and law enforcement. The campaign will launch on Thursday, May 8, and is expected to last for several months. BARTOW, Fla. - A local business caught in the middle of a shootout is now showing its appreciation for the responding officers who risked their lives to protect the community. At Banker's Brew, located at 120 Polk St E, there are still remnants of a shootout that occurred between a suspect, Bartow police officers, and Polk County Sheriff's deputies on Good Friday. A Bartow coffee shop is launching a free coffee campaign for first responders, weeks after a recent shootout. PREVIOUS STORY: 'We shot him a lot:' Man opens fire on law enforcement after holding parents hostage Orange circles spraypainted on the concrete mark where numerous shell casings once laid and a bullet hole remains in the drive-through menu. At Banker's Brew, there are still remnants of a shootout that occurred between a suspect and law enforcement. Three of Mike McMillan's employees were working at the time of the shooting, including his sister-in-law. "She was smart enough to say, 'Hey, let's hide in the bathroom,' and then they heard the bam, bam, bam, bam," said McMillan. "When everything got quiet, they saw him lying on the ground." The suspect, Wayne Volz, 34, who had assaulted his parents and threatened to kill them earlier in the day in Fort Meade, opened fire at the police and deputies. He shot a Bartow Police officer in the chest. Thankfully, the officer's bullet-proof vest stopped the bullet. A Polk County Sheriff's deputy was also shot in the arm. Both survived. However, the suspect was shot dead. READ: Lakeland HS assistant football coach arrested, accused of stealing $10,000+ worth of helmets from team This wasn't the only shooting in April. Three weeks in a row, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said his deputies were forced to shoot and kill three people who attacked or threatened them with a knife or gun. As a simple thank you to first responders, McMillan says he's starting a campaign, so customers can buy them a free drink. What they're saying "They do so much," said McMillan. "They put their lives at risk all the time, and we can bless them with a cup of coffee or energy drink, we can boost their day with some love and some caffeine." A Bartow coffee shop is launching a free coffee campaign for first responders, weeks after a recent shootout. Lydia Cordova works nearby and gets coffee here at least once a week. "I think it's recognizable that people, especially law enforcement, should be acknowledged, so I think he's doing a great deed, in my opinion," said Cordova. It's a small gesture, McMillan hopes will show first responders the community does not take them for granted. "We're going to take something that's ugly, and we're going to turn it into something beautiful," he said. "Hopefully everybody will pay it forward and be thankful that we're lucky to have them," said Cordova. What's next The campaign will launch on Thursday, May 8, and is expected to last for several months. CLICK HERE:>>>Follow FOX 13 on YouTube The Source Information for this story was gathered by FOX 13's Carla Bayron. STAY CONNECTED WITH FOX 13 TAMPA:
USA Today
05-04-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Duke coach Jon Scheyer makes replacing a legend look easy. It's unbelievably hard.
Duke coach Jon Scheyer makes replacing a legend look easy. It's unbelievably hard. Just three years into his tenure, Jon Scheyer leads Duke into a Final Four game with a powerhouse program that has quickly been remade in his image. Show Caption Hide Caption Duke, Auburn, Houston players talk NCAA age limit before Final Four Men's Final Four players weigh in on if college basketball should have an age limit SAN ANTONIO – Years after he walked away from the job that seemed like any basketball coach's dream, Gene Bartow would joke about it. It wasn't so much that he was worried UCLA would fire him, he said. 'But assassinated? That's a different thing.' Bartow, who died in 2012, was 44 years old when he got an offer he couldn't refuse: Replace John Wooden, who announced his retirement on March 29, 1975, and won his 10th NCAA championship two days later. But it didn't take long before Bartow realized he made a mistake leaving Illinois after one season. The pressure of replacing Wooden and the microscope he was living under in Los Angeles made him miserable and paranoid. The stress ate away at him, literally. And even though UCLA went 52-9 under Bartow, reaching a Final Four and a Sweet 16, he left after two years to become the athletics director and head coach of UAB's startup program. 'Deep down, I thought we might be able to win the national championship that third year and I kind of wanted to battle on through it,' Bartow told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. 'But I kept thinking, 'Even if we do, even if we go undefeated and win the national championship, would it really change some of the things that were ingrained?' " For generations, Bartow's early departure and the four coaches after him who either failed miserably or couldn't cope with the demands of the UCLA job, defined one of the most prominent axioms in sports: You never want to be the coach who follows a legend. So when Duke announced on June 4, 2021, that 33-year-old Jon Scheyer would replace Mike Krzyzewski the following April, it would have been reasonable based on history to predict the worst. To wonder if Scheyer was offered up as a sacrificial lamb in an impossible situation. To be skeptical that a first-time head coach less than a decade removed from his playing career could credibly lead a program that had been under Krzyzewski's rule for 42 years. And yet on Saturday night here at the Alamodome, just three years into his tenure, Scheyer will lead Duke out of the tunnel and onto the court for a Final Four game against Houston with a powerhouse program that has quickly been remade in his image, and a potential championship team that he constructed without any real connection to the Krzyzewski era. It has arguably been the smoothest, most-successful, drama-free transition from legend to replacement in the history of sports. 'I'll tell you how good Jon Scheyer has been,' Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said. 'Nobody talks about him replacing Coach K anymore. He's Jon Scheyer. He's got his team in the Final Four. I think that speaks volumes.' Anyone who thinks it was always going to play out this way, or that Duke's program was going to stay on autopilot in a post-Krzyzewski world because of its brand or the significant money the school and its boosters committed to the roster simply doesn't understand how difficult these transitions typically are in college sports. Whether it was Lute Olson's messy handoff to Kevin O'Neill at Arizona, the complete meltdown at UConn after Kevin Ollie won a shocking national title in his second year replacing Jim Calhoun or Villanova having to cut the cord with Kyle Neptune just three years into the post-Jay Wright era, failure is normal. What's happened at Duke is the outlier. 'It's not easy,' said new UNLV coach Josh Pastner, who was 31 back in 2009 when he was tabbed to replace John Calipari at Memphis. 'You feel the pressure, there's no doubt about it. You can't not feel it. I couldn't be Coach Calipari. What he did there, only one guy could do that. "So you've got to be comfortable in your own skin. You have to do it the way you believe is the right way, and there's mistakes along the way and I'm sure Jon has felt that. So I understand it, and the job he's done following Coach K is about as impressive following a legend at that stature as we've seen in the recent time of any sport, not just college basketball.' The credit, of course, goes mostly to Scheyer. He's been up to the job in recruiting, securing four straight No. 1-ranked classes while using the transfer portal to fill in some holes and boost the experience level of the roster. He's been perfectly capable in the X and O department. And he's shown a high level of emotional IQ, projecting a presence that is both commanding and approachable while avoiding the trap of cosplaying as a Krzyzewski clone. But a lot of credit goes to Krzyzewski, too, because of how thoughtfully and delicately he's handled his part in the transition. It's possible Krzyzewski will be somewhere in the stands watching Saturday, though it's not a guarantee. Since coaching his last game at the Final Four in 2022, he has maintained an office at Duke as an ambassador for the program of sorts but has chosen to be circumspect about his appearances at Duke games or other places where he might draw attention away from Scheyer. Though Krzyzewski hosts a weekly radio show, it seems that his general posture has been to help when needed behind the scenes but to mostly stay out of the way. 'Coach K has given me amazing room to be myself,' said Scheyer, who was the point guard in 2010 for Krzyzewski's fourth championship team. 'I think he understands when he's around, just the gravity and the people looking at him and all that. But our communication has been the same all the time. "I'll tell you, in the toughest moments that I've had as a head coach my first three years, the person I call is him. And for him to talk me through different moments or situations, not many coaches still have their coach. I do, and I couldn't be more grateful to that. 'Not many coaches truly want the program to succeed once they're done, and I think part of his legacy forever will be the fact that he set our program up for such success. We're able to be in the Final Four in Year 3, and it's a credit to him and how the succession has gone down.' In retrospect, Krzyzewski clearly understood and internalized the complicated nature of what would follow when he announced his retirement in the summer of 2021 but gave himself one more season to coach. People who were conditioned to be skeptical of Krzyzewski's motives might have interpreted that as an ego-boosting retirement tour, standing in stark contrast to North Carolina coach Roy Williams' surprise announcement two months earlier that he was handing the program off immediately to Hubert Davis. Four years on, however, North Carolina is a bit of a mess. Though his first team got hot and made the national championship game as a No. 8 seed – delivering Krzyzewski's final loss along the way – Davis has struggled with the nuts and bolts of running the program in a landscape dominated by NIL and the transfer portal. North Carolina has now hired Jim Tanner as general manager in hopes that Davis' tenure can be salvaged next year when he'll clearly be under a mandate to return the Tar Heels to the national stage. The way Krzyzewski handled his retirement, on the other hand, gave Scheyer 10 months to ease into the job and both mentally prepare himself to be the next head coach while also setting up the infrastructure of the program and the recruiting apparatus to hit the ground running while not having to worry about the full responsibility of coaching the team. By the time Scheyer fully took over, he had already signed blue-chip recruits like Dariq Whitehead, Dereck Lively, Kyle Filipowski and Tyrese Proctor, who knew they were coming to Duke to play for Scheyer, not Krzyzewski. It turned out to be an invaluable period, given the scope of the transition. 'I think that year was definitely mischaracterized,' Scheyer said. 'Coach K's biggest intention was that he wanted the program to be able to sustain great success. And in order to do that, especially in that time, you had to have a chance to recruit a team. 'Another thing that was just as important, it made it more real for me. Some of the best conversations I've ever had with Coach was throughout that season, just talking about why he makes certain decisions, what's going on in his mind in real time during a game. "So you're thinking about, all right, he called a timeout. Would I call the timeout at the same time? Being here at the Final Four (in 2022), going through the tournament, it just made it more real. It was a great trial run for me to imagine what plays you would call in certain situations.' It has not, of course, been a straight line to the top for Duke in the post-Krzyzewski era. Some of the recruits in Scheyer's first couple of classes fell short of their massive expectations. Losing to NC State in the Elite Eight last year as a huge favorite was a gut punch. And in the long run, it's unlikely Scheyer comes close to matching the Krzyzewski standard because that's just not a realistic comparison when you're talking about 1,129 wins, 13 Final Fours and five titles. But in just his third year as a head coach, Scheyer has proven that he can handle the pressure of running a blueblood program, that he can relate to elite talent without being a pushover and that he can construct rosters at maybe an even higher level than Krzyzewski did in his last several years, when the pieces didn't always seem to quite fit. Nobody can see the future, but all the signs suggest Scheyer is here to stay, and Duke is going to avoid the years of drama and tumult that often follow when a legend steps away. Scheyer doesn't need a national title Monday to validate the Duke succession plan, but it would be an exclamation point on how unusually seamless he and Krzyzewski have navigated a path that swallowed up so many who traversed it before.
USA Today
21-03-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Why Gene Bartow left UCLA for UAB after succeeding John Wooden
Why Gene Bartow left UCLA for UAB after succeeding John Wooden Tennessee and UCLA will play for a second time in men's college basketball. The Vols and Bruins will face each other in the NCAA Tournament second round Saturday at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. The only Tennessee-UCLA basketball game all time was on Jan. 30, 1977. The Bruins were victorious, 103-89, in a top 10 matchup at Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, Georgia. The 1976-77 campaign marked the last season for UCLA with Gene Bartow as head coach. He served as UCLA's head coach for two seasons, replacing 10-time national champion John Wooden. Bartow would coach 11 more contests for UCLA after defeating the Vols in the 1976-77 regular season. Following head coaching stints at Central Missouri State, Valparaiso, Memphis and Illinois, Bartow was known throughout college athletics, allowing him to be in position to replace Wooden at UCLA. As a second-year head coach with the Bruins in 1977, Bartow was ready to move on from a historic program. He had a vision of starting an athletics department at UAB. Bartow, a 2009 Hall of Fame inductee, was hired by UAB shortly after the Tennessee-UCLA regular-season game in Atlanta. Wayne Martin covered Bartow during his tenure as UAB's head coach (1978–96) and athletics director (1977–2000) for The Birmingham News. Ahead of the Tennessee-UCLA game in the 2025 NCAA Tournament second round, Martin discussed Bartow leaving the Bruins after succeeding Wooden. 'UAB had a couple of guys that decided they wanted to start major college basketball there,' Martin said. 'They decided they wanted to get a top name coach to give it credibility from the start, so they decided to get together and come up with a package that would attract somebody from a top name school. 'They knew, of course, of Bartow because he had been at Memphis and Illinois. They wanted to see if they could get with Bartow and get him to give them a package to attract a top name coach. They met with Gene and they laid out their plans for a program. He said he would come up with a package for them and they would meet back up at a different time. Maybe a month later, they met again, and he said this is the package that you need to present to a coach, and I have a recommendation that would be receptive to it — and he said me. That was the nuts and the bolts of it.' Outside influence with boosters and a new-age of media at UCLA allowed for Bartow to leave and launch an athletics program from scratch at UAB. 'To coach UCLA, who wouldn't leave to go coach,' Martin said. 'What Wooden did there, it was a premier program in the country. At UAB, he was comfortable. At UCLA, he was not.' Bartow quickly turned UAB basketball into a contender for championships. He guided the Blazers to the Sweet 16 in his third season and to the Elite Eight in year No. 4. The Blazers made the NCAA Tournament in seven consecutive seasons from 1981-87. His continued success at UAB allowed for another historic program to be in pursuit of hiring him. Martin recalled how Bartow was Kentucky's head coach for four hours. 'He turned down the Kentucky job after he got to UAB,' Martin said. 'Gene really never had to interview for a job. They had always called him and said would you take this job? They called and said how about coming up and talking to us about the Kentucky job. He did. He interviewed, and they offered him the job, and he accepted it. 'He went to the basketball office, met with the assistants, they went over the people they were recruiting, and for four hours he was the head coach. Then he told them that he was not going to officially accept the job until talking with his president, because he promised Dr. (S. Richardson) Hill that he would do that. They said no, you are either going to accept it now or we will go somewhere else. He said then you will have to go somewhere else.' Bartow continued to build an athletics program at UAB. The Blazers' athletics program, since its inception, has a history with the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa attempting to not allow for sports to prosper. Following Bartow's arrival, UAB athletics has been negated an opportunity to have an on-campus football stadium and their football program was attempted to be shut down following the 2014 season. When Bartow took over at UAB in June 1977, Bear Bryant was in his final years as Alabama's football head coach and athletics director. 'Bryant would not allow it at all,' Martin said of UAB having athletics. 'He, and they, were all opposed to it. When they started pushback, too, there was pushback.' Alabama has never played UAB in football and one time in men's basketball. Alabama was mandated to host the Blazers in the 1993 NIT. Bartow guided UAB to a, 58-56, win over the Crimson Tide. UAB alum Tim Stephens highlighted how the 1993 UAB-Alabama basketball game was "built on bad blood, politics and one massive 3-pointer." Bartow would coach UAB three more seasons after defeating the Crimson Tide and advancing to the 1993 NIT Final Four. He was the Blazers' first men's basketball head coach and athletics director, serving in both capacities for 18 years before retiring as a coach in 1996 and athletics director in 2000. Tipoff for the Tennessee-UCLA game Saturday is slated for 9:40 p.m. EDT and will be televised by TBS/truTV. The matchup will be contested 48 years later after Bartow coached against the Vols with UCLA, and where he could have been Kentucky's head coach.
