The Sentinel
Standard

The four pillars

Audiences, in priority order

We write like a beat reporter who happens to love the team — accurate first, warm second, never promotional.

Six voice principles

Register by context

Lexicon

The same night, three ways

Recap opening. Result, margin, opponent, event — one sentence, no adjectives.

Social caption. Same facts, compressed. No emoji strings, no all-caps.

A loss, in the brand's own voice. Honest, specific, forward-looking — and published.

Mechanics

• Name: "St. Christopher Academy" on first mention; "St. Christopher" or "the academy" after. Never "St. Chris" in external copy. Never "Saint" spelled out.
• Monogram in text: the mark is the StC monogram — capital S, lowercase t, capital C. Never written "SCA" or "STC" when referring to the artwork.
• Team: "the Sentinels" — plural verb. "Sentinels basketball," lowercase b.
• Scores: en dash, winner first: 68–49. Away games take "at."
• Stats: "6-of-11," "5-of-11 from three," "20 points." Per-game averages carry one decimal: 17.4 PPG.
• Class year: "Class of 2029" in prose; c2029 in filenames.
• Heights: 6'8" with straight foot and inch marks, consistently.
• Dates: "Nov 3, 2026" in copy; 20261103 in filenames. Seasons as 2026–27.
• Sentence case for headlines and buttons. Display type set in Graduate is inherently capitalised — that is a typeface, not permission for all-caps body text.

Two marks. One is the school. One is the team. Confusing them is the most common brand error available to us.

The StC Monogram

Interlocking collegiate S t C. The institutional mark. Academy Blue keyline, white counters.

The Sentinel Badge

Armoured sentinel with torch and shield, over the St. Christopher Sentinels banner. The athletic mark.

Mark architecture — which one, when

Clear space

XXXX

X equals the width of the monogram's keyline stroke × 6, measured at the widest point of the C. Applied on all four sides of either mark. Nothing enters it — not type, not a photo edge, not another logo.

Minimum sizes

Mark	Screen	Print
StC monogram	28 px tall	10 mm tall
Sentinel badge, full colour	96 px tall	32 mm tall
Sentinel badge, simplified	48 px tall	16 mm tall

The badge's detail collapses below its minimum. Under 96 px, use the simplified crest or the monogram — never a shrunken full-colour badge.

Backgrounds

Chalk — preferred

Navy — approved

Academy Blue — never

The monogram's white counters read as fill, not as holes. On Academy Blue the keyline disappears and the mark becomes an unreadable white shape — this is why the one-colour reverse version is a required deliverable, not a nice-to-have.

Misuse — both marks

Correct

• Monogram in Academy Blue on chalk, or reversed in white on navy
• Badge full colour on navy, midnight, or a dark neutral
• Either mark over the darkest, quietest area of a photo
• Scaled proportionally from the highest-resolution source

Never

• Recolour the badge, or separate the sentinel figure from its banner
• Use the sentinel figure alone as a mascot illustration without approval
• Stretch, skew, rotate, outline, or add shadow to either mark
• Set the monogram letters in a substitute collegiate typeface
• Place the badge on a busy image without a flat scrim
• Enlarge the supplied PNGs beyond 100 % of native pixel size
• Lock either mark to a partner mark without a divider rule and written approval

Production status — what exists, what is missing Decision

An honest audit of the two supplied files. Both are raster PNGs with transparent backgrounds; neither is a vector master. Until that is fixed, the identity cannot be embroidered, engraved, cut in vinyl, or printed above roughly A4.

Required derivative set Proposed

Three families, three jobs. The display face answers to the monogram's collegiate letterforms — not to a magazine.

One grammar governs every file, folder, slug, token and AI project the academy produces. If you can read the name, you know what the thing is, who it is about, when it was made, and where it goes — without opening it.

The grammar

sca-category-subject-descriptor-variant-spec-vNN.ext
 │      │         │          │           │        │      │
 │      │         │          │           │        │      └─ version, always two digits
 │      │         │          │           │        └──────── size, ratio or colour space
 │      │         │          │           └───────────────── colour or state: blue, navy, gold, reverse
 │      │         │          └───────────────────────────── what it is: headshot, recap, onepager
 │      │         └──────────────────────────────────────── who or what: player, opponent, date, mark
 │      └────────────────────────────────────────────────── one of nine categories, below
 └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────── always. every asset. no exceptions.

sca-logo-monogram-blue-rgb.svg          the institutional mark
sca-logo-sentinel-flat-2c.svg           the athletic mark, embroidery-ready

Only sca, the category and the descriptor are mandatory. Drop any middle slot that doesn't apply, but never reorder the ones you keep.

Five unbreakable rules

• Lowercase, hyphens only. No spaces, underscores, ampersands, apostrophes or accents. okauru, not O'Kauru.
• Dates are YYYYMMDD. Seasons are 2026-27. Class years are c2029. These three never vary.
• Versions are v01, v02, v03. The words final, new, latest, use-this and FINAL2 are banned outright.
• Player keys are firstname-lastname — matching the live site slugs exactly. Suffixes stay attached: harvey-jenkins-iii.
• Never rename a published asset. Publish a new version and retire the old one behind a redirect.

The nine categories

sca-brand/
├── 01-identity/
│   ├── monogram/
│   ├── sentinel/
│   └── lockups/
├── 02-color-type/
└── 03-templates/
sca-seasons/
└── 2026-27/
    ├── players/
    ├── games/
    │   └── 20261103-a-fayetteville-academy/
    ├── film/
    └── social/
sca-docs/
├── recruiting/
├── admissions/
└── legal/
sca-ai/
├── SCA-BRAND-CONTEXT.md
├── SCA-VOICE-EXAMPLES.md
└── SCA-STATS-RULES.md

Design & code tokens

Naming beyond files