With a new track season getting underway in Gainesville, the Florida track and field team is provided an opportunity to wash away the lingering taste of a frustrating 2025 season.
At times last spring, it felt as if a new injury was popping up for the Gators every week. Just as one athlete would get back on the track, another would take their place in the training room. The results of that tumultuous season were, unsurprisingly, a series of disappointing championship finishes with a few lone bright spots. It was a team with plenty of potential that ended up very far from adding another championship year onto the wall overlooking Percy Beard Track.
“We kind of lost our pride last year,” head coach Mike Holloway said.
There’s no better way to move past a season full of, in Holloway’s words, “bad luck” than an injection of new athletes and new personalities to reset. Across Florida’s first two meets of the 2025-26 season – the Sharon Colyear-Danville Season Opener in Boston on Dec. 6 and the Jimmy Carnes Invitational in Gainesville on Jan. 16 – 19 of the 40 Gators that competed in individual events made their track debuts in Orange and Blue.
Whether these newcomers were freshmen dipping their toes into collegiate action for the first time or transfers opening up a new season in a new environment, they showed promise to turn the tides for the Gators this season.
It’s been more than a decade since Florida last had a man earn indoor first-team All-American honors in the shot put, but freshman Jarno van Daalen’s debut at Jimmy Carnes lent credence to the idea that he could be the one to break that streak. Despite it being an off day by his standards, throwing a meter under his personal best, he still produced a mark of 18.50 meters.
That ranks van Daalen as the top true freshman in the NCAA and No. 23 in the nation as a whole. His 18.50-meter toss was his only legal attempt of the afternoon in Gainesville, but the throws he left on the board due to fouling were well beyond that distance.
For most of his career at home in the Netherlands before coming to UF, he threw a 6-kilogram shot put as opposed to the 7.26-kilogram shot that is thrown in the NCAA. With first-meet jitters out of the way and increasing comfortability with the new implement every competition, van Daalen could end up scoring points for the Gators in the throws at the national championships – something they missed in back-to-back third-place finishes in 2023 and 2024.
Sophomore Judy Chepkoech and freshman Claire Stegall showcased just how impressive the women’s distance unit is, which has been one of the Gators’ most consistent and successful event groups since assistant coach Will Palmer came to Gainesville.
In Boston, Chepkoech carried the fitness that saw her finish 16th at the Cross Country National Championships in November over to the track flawlessly. In a meet where the 88 fastest 5,000-meter times in the nation this season were run, the Arizona State transfer finished seventh overall in 15:12.57.
Chepkoech had a similarly strong, All-American-type cross country season in 2024 as a Sun Devil, but her indoor season was underwhelming, and she didn’t race outdoors. The trip across the country has paid dividends for Chepkoech, as she and senior Hilda Olemomoi – who finished fourth in Boston and ran the fourth-fastest 5,000 meters in NCAA history at the 2024 edition of that meet – could both end up on the scoring table in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at the National Championships.
Stegall’s 2:41.72 kilometer at Jimmy Carnes is one of the fastest times in NCAA history over the distance, but that marker doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. The 1,000-meter is a rarely-run, awkward distance between the 800-meter and the mile that is not contested at the national meet.
A more significant takeaway from the Tennessee native’s run is that at the same meet last January, her teammate, Beth Morley, ran a very similar time of 2:41.20. A month later, Morley ran what was at the time the 13th-fastest mile in collegiate history, notching a national qualifying time with her 4:26.76 performance in Boston.
Does this mean that Stegall is guaranteed to run in the 4:20s the first time she lines up for a mile? Not necessarily, but it proves that she’s managed to not miss a beat in her transition from one of the best high school runners in the U.S. to one of the best collegians.
On the men’s distance side, Southeastern Conference cross country champion Kelvin Cheruiyot made his highly anticipated track debut in Boston. After 25 laps of the track, the freshman took 10 seconds off the standing program record in the 5,000 meters, stopping the clock at 13:31.40. Cheruiyot’s time is impressive, but it’s three spots outside of the top 16 marks in the nation, which is the qualifying cutoff for nationals. If he wants to become Florida’s first representative in the men’s 5,000 meters at the championship meet since 2015, he’ll need to run at least a second faster before the end of conference weekend.
Luke Stradley and Temoso Masikane could blossom into one of the best one-two long jump punches in the nation as the season progresses. Stradley, a freshman from Georgia, took a commanding victory at Jimmy Carnes in the opening salvo of his collegiate career. His 7.56-meter winning mark is situated at No. 25 nationally this season and was just a few centimeters off his personal best.
Masikane has yet to compete in the long jump as a Gator, instead notching a third-place finish in the triple jump at Jimmy Carnes, but he comes to Gainesville as the African under-18 record holder in the event. The Phokeng, South Africa, native jumped 8.06 meters in 2023, which is the eighth-best mark ever by a youth athlete. He matched that distance last spring, which is something only four men in the NCAA could have claimed to do.
There were big spikes left to fill this fall when Stradley and Masikane stepped onto campus, with 2025 NCAA Outdoor champion Malcolm Clemons having graduated in the summer, but a mix of early returns and future projections signal that the pair should be ready to do just that.
No event group has been transformed as much across the board by the incoming class as the sprints. The best example of this was at Jimmy Carnes, where the Gators raced their first women’s 4x400-meter relay in nearly two years. Three of the legs on that team were freshmen.
Tyra Cox and Sydney Sutton had made their collegiate debuts earlier in the day over 300 meters. Cox earned an impressive win in 36.99, landing just outside the 25 fastest performers in collegiate history, while Sutton finished third in 37.19. Malia Campbell was the third freshman on the relay quartet. She ran a personal best in the indoor 200-meter a few hours earlier in 24.45. While the potential points that Cox or Sutton could score individually on the national or conference levels will be beneficial, just the act of actually having a relay team that’s currently ranked ninth in the NCAA could swing tight team races down the line.
Jade Brown made her presence felt in the short sprints, winning the 60-meter dash at Jimmy Carnes in 7.32. The junior transfer from Arizona owns personal bests that would rank fifth in Florida history in the 60 meters and second in the 100 meters outdoors. If she can replicate or improve upon that form this spring, it would lessen the impact of Anthaya Charlton’s graduation, who finished fourth in the 100 meters at last year’s NCAA Outdoor Championships.
Jayden Horton-Mims brings an impressive pedigree in the long sprints to Gainesville, and he flexed his speed endurance over 300 meters at Jimmy Carnes. The former high school national record holder in the event finished as the third collegian in the field, running 32.96. Horton-Mims is one of the most talented freshmen to ever wear a Florida kit, and his arrival on campus is especially important given how hard the men’s sprints group was hit by injuries last season. His times from his senior year of high school – 20.36 for 200 meters and 45.24 for 400 – would have ranked third and second among Gator athletes in 2025.
With two meets down and two to go before the indoor postseason begins, Florida’s new additions have brought a spark to a team that often found itself on the receiving end of unfortunate outcomes last season. They’ve already broken records and collected wins, and Holloway likes what he sees.
“I see a restoration of that [our pride] going on right now, so I’m really happy about that,” he said. “As you can see, we’re trending towards being pretty dadgum good this year.”
Contact Paul Hof-Mahoney at phof-mahoney@alligator.org and follow him on X at @phofmahoney.
Paul is a senior in his fourth semester on the track and field/cross country beat for The Alligator. In his free time, you can increasingly see him jogging around Gainesville or endlessly falling deeper down the rabbit hole that is track Twitter.
