Chip Davenport

Chip Davenport


Chip Shots: Football Rambling

Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, bought the team for approximately $140 million in 1989. He said, in an episode of the NFL Network’s A Football Life, that an entrepreneurial type of businessperson must be comfortable with ambiguity.

Chip Shots: The Goal: Chicken Salad

I returned from my company’s North American controller’s conference Thursday night with a takeaway I’ll share this morning.

Chip Shots: Team USA Missed Uncontested Open Shot

The 2024 Paris Olympics is behind us, but the television ratings were better than the 2021 (postponed from 2020 due to COVID) games in Tokyo. Women’s basketball, specifically Team USA’s games, average 7.8 million viewers, no noticeable change between the two sets televised games in 2021 and this summer.

Chip Shots: Not Feeling Stuck In The Middle

Stealer’s Wheel released a surprise hit, Stuck in the Middle With You” in 1972. It was a surprise because Gerry Rafferty and his bandmates used the song to parody Bob Dylan in vocals and lyrics on a lark.

Claypool’s Kennedy Krull Makes Leap From 1A To D1

Kennedy Krull, a Claypool resident, a Whitko basketball and softball alum, a Huntington University (NAIA) infielder, and most recently Triton Junior-Senior High School’s head varsity girls’ basketball and softball coach is taking another big leap into a Division I (D1) college softball assistant coaching position with Georgia Southern University.

Chip Shots: Are You Ready For Some (Option) Football?

Can you hear Hank Williams Jr.’s voice from the ABC Monday Night Football musical intros?

Chip Shots: NBA Action In The Ivory Towers

Free agency is winding up, and most of the action remains in the Association’s ivory towers.

Chip Shots: Loyalty

I follow teams more these days based on how they operate as a business rather than any regional loyalty I had similar to my days growing up in Northeast Ohio.

Chip Shots: The Slowest Week Of Sports

I comment about this July week in sports each year: Major League Baseball All-Star break, Home Run Derby, the All-Star game itself, the ESPY awards (ESPN’s sports-related award show with huge names on the red carpet, pre-show) … and nothing else really happening.

Beam, Pohl Represent Tigers As IFCA All-Stars Tonight

Isaac Beam and Eric Pohl, Warsaw Tiger football defensive standouts and recent graduates in the Class of 2024, will represent the North in tonight’s Indiana Football Coaches Association (IFCA) North-South All-Star Game at Decatur Central High School.

Chip Shots: Asking For A Friend

Does a baseball movie watched from start to finish count as watching baseball from beginning to end? Asking for a friend.

Chip Shots: Middle Schoolers Must Clear The Redshirt Hurdle

Let’s talk about football redshirts.

Chip Shots: Is It Too Soon?

Seven more Fridays until the high school football scrimmages and jamborees will launch the 2024 season.

Chip Shots: Look What I Found

Two Saturdays ago, something said to me in passing triggered a memory of some wisdom passed on to me during the football preseason of 2018 resulting in an “a-ha!” moment.

Chip Shots: Here Comes Apathy Season

Sportswriters and Sports section opinion columnists who love all sports are rarer than you think. They’re handy because they can maintain an enthusiastic level of opinions as their readers navigate the seasons, and almost everyone is happy.

Chip Shots: Two-Headed Thoughts

My weekend thoughts take the form of a two-headed life form:

Chip Shots: Manage Your Expectations

Caitlin Clark, professional women’s basketball’s arguably most heralded rookie, has two completed basketball games in the books after The Indiana Fever’s 102-66 loss to the New York Liberty.

Chip Shots: Hats Off Works Best For Me

My only interest in The Kentucky Derby (took place last Saturday) is to see some shots in the audience to see how many people have wealth but lack good taste. As departed comedian Joan Rivers once said, “Every woman needs a gay friend… to tell her no!”

Chip Shots: Diamond Days

Recently, at a softball game, I noticed just about every athlete has her own bat worth at least 300 dollars and I did math in public to figure out how much that would be between the teams’ tow dugouts.

Chip Shots: Psyching Myself Up In Mid-Column

“Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we’re dead.” – Sinclair Lewis

Chip Shots: Spring Break Potpourri

Enjoy the tail end of your spring break and enjoy some Final Four action tonight.

Chip Shots: Competitors Who Lose Vs. Losers

There are athletes and teams who rarely win in numerous individual and team competitions, and fans and sportswriters will call them losers.

Chip Shots: Watching, Listening To March Madness

My body was under repair this week with two minor procedures Monday, and a major surgery on Tuesday. It dawned on me before the week that this unusually slow-paced week for me coincided with the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the Round of 64 specifically.

Chip Shots: Schmegegge

This is one of those weekends where my focus on a single topic has been hard to execute. Therefore, I have multiple topics to freely discuss.

Tigers Run Out Of Gas In Regional Overtime Loss

A game of streaks between two championship caliber basketball teams usually ends when one team’s late run wears out the opponent to pull away with a victory whose margin of victory makes the win look far more convincing than it was.

Chip Shots: This One’s For The Girls

January and February afforded high school girl’s and college women’s basketball fans to enjoy their local talents and see Caitlin Clark eclipse not only the women’s scoring record, but the overall college basketball scoring record.

Blood + Sweat + Tears = A Warsaw Tigers Sectional Title

Blood, Sweat, and Tears – a band whose music was at its greatest popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s – would have been a fitting form of halftime entertainment at Elkhart’s Hoosier basketball temple, North Side Gymnasium. The Warsaw Tigers boys’ basketball team captured its 41st sectional title in the program’s history at this hallowed Hoosier Hysteria venue, defeating the Penn Kingsmen 46-34 Saturday night in the IHSAA Class 4A Sectional 4 battle.

Chip Shots: Two Tournaments

Thoughts of two tournaments were on my mind during my Friday afternoon lunch hour: the College Football Playoff (CFP), and the IHSAA boys’ basketball sectionals.

Chip Shots: An Irish Goodbye

I attended, for the first time, the fourth annual We Are Tigers auction Thursday evening. I’ve had schedule conflicts in prior years, and an unexpected opening in my calendar afforded Shawna and me some time to attend.

Chip Shots: Enjoy The Silence

Depeche Mode’s album (remember those) Violator was released in 1990, and one song – Enjoy The Silence - is playing in my head.

Chip Shots: Shakeups Loom in Class 6A, 5A Football

Recent Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) enrollment indicates Warsaw will organically land in IHSAA Football Class 5A in the 2024 football season.