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Ah, February. It’s spring again. Sort of.
This weekend marks the beginning of the season for two Florida Gators teams — lacrosse and softball — that are “spring” sports, in that their seasons largely play out over the spring months. (Pay no mind to the fact that the NCAA Tournaments in men’s and women’s basketball -- “winter” sports — routinely conclude in April, and sometimes take place entirely after the vernal equinox, or to the majority of the College World Series taking place after the summer solstice in a city where the heat ain’t playing.)
That means that 13 Florida teams — including two No. 1 teams, five top-three teams, seven top-five teams, and nine top-five teams, none of which are the Gators men’s basketball team that is currently trouncing even its better foes — will be officially in competition as of the end of this weekend, with Florida’s baseball team becoming the 14th active winter/spring team next weekend.
That is a slew of teams, each with its own cast of players to celebrate and book of stories to tell, and I can promise you that if I could clone myself at least 13 times, I would love to follow and report on each of those teams as assiduously as I try to follow and report on football and men’s basketball, the two sports that I am contractually obligated to cover at Alligator Army.
I don’t have that technology, though, and I don’t have the time in the day to give every one of those sports its fair due during the course of a given day, week, or weekend. I never have, even though I think I’ve often done good work to cover them when I can.
But the other truth of the matter is that the all-sports roundups and occasional dips into in-depth coverage of Florida teams that don’t always play on CBS and ESPN do not drive conversation and traffic here like even garden-variety football coverage does. And while I think it can take a thousand words — and have taken multiple thousands of words — just to cover the events of a given weekend for the Everything School, time I spend on those sports is time I am not allocating to other things that might draw more eyeballs or generate more discussion or so forth.
I have plans for this spring, and I think adding more writers — we’re still doing that, yes — will help us ramp up coverage. What I want to know, as ever, is what you want.
So tell me in the comments, please: What sorts of all-sports coverage of the Florida Gators that don’t use the gridiron do you expect and want from Alligator Army?