On a heavily-saturated Cecil Field Golf Course in Jacksonville, the Florida cross country program opened its season with strong team and individual showings.
The women’s squad, ranked 11th in the nation according to the USTFCCCA coaches poll, placed all five runners inside the top 11 finishers, securing a dominant team win with just 26 points. The men finished second, behind only the hosts, North Florida, and saw three men finish inside the top seven.
“It was a good start,” said Florida assistant coach Cameron Ponder. “We wanted to come out here and definitely wanted it to be more close to a race effort, but we wanted to do it together. For the most part, the group did a great job of that.”
The women’s race was first on the schedule, and the trio of freshman Desma Chepkoech, sophomore Reagan Gilmore and senior Caroline Wells made an immediate move to the lead pack. The message to the whole team was to work together throughout the whole race, and the trio executed that to the letter.
“With those three ladies, we told them, ‘If one of you is gonna pass somebody, all of you need to pass somebody,’” said Florida associate head coach Will Palmer. “‘We want you together stride-for-stride the whole way,’ and they did that.”
The Gators had company in the form of a Florida State duo and an athlete from Florida Gulf Coast throughout most of the race, but they opened a sizable gap as the finish line neared. Chepkoech and Gilmore chomped their way across the finish line nearly simultaneously, covering the 5-kilometer course in 17:00.2 and 17:00.4, respectively. Wells dropped back a bit, finishing in 17:03.1, but she was still nearly five seconds ahead of any other runner.
“The race was good, it was not hard,” Chepkoech, a native of Bomet, Kenya, said of her collegiate debut. “It was good to be with my teammates… and we came positions 1-2-3, so I thank God for that.”
Redshirt junior Breanna Stuart’s ninth-place finish (17:53.9) and redshirt sophomore Kate Drummond’s 11th-place finish (18:04.1) rounded out a 26-point night for the Gators, half the points of the 27th-ranked Florida State women.
The Gators were more patient in the men’s race, staying competitive but not leading early and then making up significant ground in the later kilometers.
Sophomores Jonathan Leon and Josh Ruiz were strong examples of this tactic, as they held back when unattached athlete Christian Giller got out far ahead of the pack, but they managed to methodically work their way through the chaos of a 119-man field. The pair ended with nearly identical times on the clock, with Leon placing fourth in the 8-kilometer race in 24:55.7 and Ruiz placing fifth in 24:55.8.
“I thought they showed the patience and maturity that you want to see out of men that are going to be able to navigate a 10K,” Palmer said. “They ran a 10K race today, even though it was 8K, and they’re starting to figure that out.”
Redshirt sophomore Riley Novack’s run was key to the Gators’ team finish, as he closed well and was rewarded with a seventh-place finish in 25:02.8. A 16th-place finish from redshirt freshman Graham Myers (25:19.1) and a 33rd-place finish from redshirt sophomore Gavin Nelson (25:55.5) also contributed to Florida’s 54 points.
Freshman Alejandro de Bastos, who is more of an 800-meter runner on the track than a true distance athlete, finished 34th (26:00.7) in his collegiate debut.
With the season opener now in the books and four weeks until the next meet, a focus for the men’s team will be learning how to run with an edge.
“We kind of want the men to kind of have this edge because Florida men’s cross country hasn’t quite been where we think it should be,” Ponder said. “That’s something we’re going to focus on with the men, is getting to that point of, like, ‘This is Florida, we want to do something special here.’”
The next race on Florida’s schedule is the Gans Creek Classic, hosted by Missouri in Columbia. It’s the Gators’ first look of the season at the course that will host the national championship races in November, and it looks to be one of the most nationally competitive meets of the regular season. The women’s team finished fourth at the 2024 edition of this meet, and the men finished 10th.
Contact Paul Hof-Mahoney at phof-mahoney@alligator.org. Follow him on X at @phofmahoney.
Paul is a junior sports journalism major who is covering the track and field beat in his first semester with the Alligator. In his free time, he enjoys watching commentary Youtube channels and consuming every medium of track and field content imaginable.
