A resurgent season for the Florida women’s track and field team reached its conclusion Saturday night in Fayetteville, Arkansas. At the 2026 NCAA Indoor Championships, head coach Mike Holloway’s team scored 27 points, landing in a tie with Brigham Young University for fifth overall.
After a weekend that was marked with high highs and low lows, the most important result is that the Gators saw a 20-point and 26-place improvement on the scoring tables when compared to last year.
Day 1
A nearly perfect first day of competition was bookended by a pair of strong runs out of freshman Claire Stegall.
Seeded into a brutal mile qualifying round that featured three of the five fastest milers in collegiate history, the Tennessee native held her own. Qualifying spots would be allotted to the top four finishers in each heat and two fastest time qualifiers, and the first heat had gone relatively slow, having been won in 4:38.62. All Stegall had to do was hold onto an honest pace and beat two of the other women in her race.
Stegall did exactly what she needed to do, sticking her nose into a lead pack that eventually saw two athletes fall off pace. With a fifth-place finish in 4:29.02, Stegall secured her spot in the final and kicked off Florida’s strong evening.
Freshman Sydney Sutton and senior Gabby Matthews made the most of difficult lane draws in the 200 meters and 400 meters, respectively, as both sprint stars successfully qualified in personal best fashion. Sutton’s 51.25-second clocking and Matthews’ 22.71-second run both came out lane three, which is often a near death sentence in indoor sprints given the tightness of the turns in the inside lanes. There’s a reason the NCAA doesn’t place athletes in lanes one or two in championship sprints.
Sandwiched between the Gators’ sprint showings was the women’s 5,000 meters final, where Florida scored its first points of the night. Despite finishing just .07 seconds apart from each other, senior Hilda Olemomoi and sophomore Judy Chepkoech took quite different routes to their fourth- and fifth-place finishes.
Olemomoi did her best to stick with a breakaway top three just past the midway point of the race, but eventually she began to drift back towards the chase pack, which Chepkoech was leading. Florida assistant distance coach Will Palmer praised Chepkoech for her ability to win “the race within the race” ahead of these championships, and she did just that.
When the Gator teammates found each other with less than a quarter-mile to go, they were in lockstep all the way across the line. Their finishes put nine points on the board for Florida, with both women outperforming their entry seed by a notable margin.
Florida continued to exceed expectations in the distance medley relay, as the ninth-seeded Gators crossed the line in fourth, adding five more points to the tally.
As is often the case in this relay, the anchor leg was the deciding factor. Following solid legs from senior Beth Morley (3:24.33 for 1,200 meters), freshman Malia Campbell (52.75 for 400 meters) and junior Layla Haynes (2:04.72 for 800 meters), Stegall received the baton in seventh.
The field quickly bunched up, as a three-second gap to the leaders vanished. When the pace picked up, Stegall went with it. Teams fell farther and farther back as the leaders approached the finish line, with Stegall eventually bringing the Gators all the way into fourth. Her 4:28.43 anchor was the second-fastest in the field and helped lead Florida to the second-fastest time in program history at 10:50.21.
With a first-day total of 14 points, the Gators had already doubled their score from last season.
Day 2
Asia Phillips got the Gators’ final day rolling with a 10th-place finish in the women’s triple jump final. While she didn’t score, the sophomore’s 13.10-meter effort was enough to earn her third consecutive second-team All-America honors.
Junior Alida van Daalen seized Florida’s final opportunity to score points in the field events, as she notched a sixth-place finish in the women’s shot put final. Her 17.79-meter throw in the fourth round was the high point of a consistent series to wrap up a season where the Dutch Olympian truly looked like herself inside the shot put circle for the first time in nearly two years.
The mile was the first final on the track the Gators found themselves in, and the most tactical race of Stegall’s career did not break the freshman’s way. Even though all 10 women in the field had dipped well under 4:30 this year when factoring in altitude conversions, the leaders game through the 1,209-meter mark at close to a five-minute pace, with less than a second separating first place and 10th.
On the pack’s penultimate time down the backstraight, the pace picked up and, unlike in the relay the night before, Stegall wasn’t able to handle the sudden change of pace. In a span of 100 meters, she dropped from fourth to 10th. Stegall wasn’t able to make up any ground on the field in the final lap, eventually ending her freshman season with a second-team All-America honor in 10th, finishing in 4:47.58.
Sutton was next on the track, and she delivered a strong performance at 51.65 to take eighth, earning Florida another point. While her time didn’t quite meet what she ran a day earlier, she still managed the third-fastest time of her life while also competing as the only true underclassman in the field.
In the 200-meter final, Matthews equaled the best placement by any Gator at this meet on the men’s or women’s team with a runner-up finish in 22.55 seconds. Running out of the first heat, Matthews set the time to beat with a significant personal best that not only broke the Florida program record but also made her the fourth-fastest Jamaican woman in history.
Only Georgia freshman Adaejah Hodge was able to better Matthews’ time in the second heat, meaning the former hurdler scored eight points for the Gators and earned the best individual finish of her career on the national stage. Her placement was matched by Florida senior Wanya McCoy in the men’s race just minutes later.
Olemomoi was back on the line as the Gators’ final individual entrant into the meet, this time over 3,000 meters. Unlike in the SEC Championship edition of this race, where Olemomoi closed the final quarter-mile in 62 seconds and finished runner-up, she dropped out of a scoring position on the final lap. Olemomoi ultimately finished ninth in 8:50.56, marking the first time in her storied career that she’s finished worse than eighth in an individual national championship race.
The Gators brought the meet to a close in a 4x400-meter relay final that was not without drama. Florida’s first handoff between junior Quincy Penn and freshman Tyra Cox took several tries to execute, essentially taking them out of the race after just one leg. The quartet, which featured Campbell and Sutton on the last two legs, still finished the race, but their time of 3:37.76 placed them 10th out of 11 teams and was nine seconds slower than their season’s best.
However, while the results were being finalized, the teams representing Texas and UCLA were both disqualified for impediment, meaning that despite their mishaps, the Gators were now moved into eighth place and earned one final team point.
The Gators will open their outdoor season in Tallahassee on Mar. 26-27 at the FSU Relays.
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.
