Walking through campus Monday brought a sense of renewal, with Turlington Plaza bustling considerably more compared to the six weeks of the Summer A semester.
The first day of Summer B classes meant an injection of fresh blood into Gainesville's landscape with the arrival of map-toting freshmen (the Class of 2013!).
Let me be the first to offer an alligatorSports welcome to you all. Even though we've all been there before, we do enjoy a chuckle or two at your expense. Don't be offended.
But before the fall kicks off a new athletic year for UF, we are going to take one last look at the sports year that was 2008-09.
That's right &ndash over the next three weeks, we are going to unveil our Top 10 UF Athletes from the previous year, beginning in Thursday's paper.
We will countdown from No. 10 to No. 1 by revealing two of our selections each issue accompanied by a short write-up on why we feel this athlete earned his or her ranking.
So how did our six-person panel of alligatorSports columnists arrive at these 10 Gators?
The rules for selection were basic, with a nomination phase followed by the final balloting. For the former, we all threw into the discussion any UF athlete we considered possibly worthy of earning top-10 recognition. All sports were eligible, although unsurprisingly our list has been mostly dominated by the bigger-revenue sports.
Then, all of the nominees were compiled on a ballot, and each columnist ranked his top 10. Points were awarded similar to all major college sports polls &ndash ranking an athlete No. 1 earned him or her 10 points, a No. 2 vote got 9 points, all the way down to 1 point for a 10th-place vote.
Remember, athletes were judged solely on their body of work during their 2008-09 competitive season. This list is not meant to rate an entire career.
Certainly, such a list is subjective. It was up to each columnist to figure out how to weigh performances across different sports as well as deciding how team performance would play a part.
A great performance on a great team (perhaps a championship-winning one) is usually going to earn more praise compared to a slightly better performance on a terrible team. This is, of course, the age-old Most Valuable Player argument.
I expect you may disagree with some of our selections. We welcome this!
Comment on the stories on alligatorSports.org or e-mail us some feedback at sports@alligator.org. Get us on Twitter even. (Keep it all clean, of course.)
We may even run some of them in a future mailbag, so don't miss out on getting your voice heard.
All of us at alligatorSports hope you enjoy debating our picks as much as we had fun making them.
