St. Johns River State College plays a softball doubleheader at home on Wednesday. On Thursday the volleyball team is home. Friday, baseball. Saturday and Sunday, volleyball again.

Six home dates in a week, at the state college this county sends its kids to, with a campus in St. Augustine.

I have filed fourteen sports stories for this newspaper. Not one of them contains the words St. Johns River State College. That is not an oversight I discovered; it is one somebody had to point out, and the fact that it needed pointing out is the column.

What is actually on that schedule

The school’s own calendar carries 245 dated entries this season, across four sports.

Softball, 103. Baseball, 88. Women’s volleyball, 33. Women’s beach volleyball, 21.

Add those up the other way and 157 of the 245 are women playing. Two thirds of the athletic calendar at the county’s state college is women’s sport, and this page has given it nothing.

There is no football team. That is the honest reason it has been skipped, and it is not a good one. Friday night is the easiest sports story in Florida to sell and the hardest to be wrong about, and a page that only goes where the crowd already is has stopped being a sports section and become a mirror.

The part that should have caught my eye a month ago

The Vikings are the only local programme that plays into the spring.

Flagler stops. The high schools stop. In February, when this page is looking for something to put under a headline, there is a baseball team on an 88-date season that nobody in this county has written a word about.

That is not a charity case. That is a sports section with a hole in its calendar and a team sitting in it.

What I am not going to pretend

I do not have a record for them. The feed this paper reads carries schedules and not results, and the other three local schools come back with wins and losses attached while this one does not. So I cannot tell you today whether the softball team is any good, and I am not going to imply it either way from a schedule.

I also do not have a gate price, a parking arrangement or a start time for half of these. The feed gives a date and the two schools and that is it.

Those are things the school can answer and this paper has not asked.

The standard I wrote down and did not keep

This byline’s own file says the beat is small-school teams nobody covers, and girls’ sport getting the same room on the page as everything else.

Fourteen stories. One county college. Two thirds women’s sport. Nothing.

A paper that will not print that about itself has no business printing it about a school board. This is the first column under this byline and it seemed like the place to start.

Wednesday

Softball, doubleheader, at home against Florida Poly.

The schedule has been sitting there all season. So has the page.

This is a column, the writer's argument, based on the facts shown above. Our news coverage is held to a separate standard, described on our standards page.