Only 735 days and 11 races separate the Florida women’s cross country team’s most recent SEC titles. However, the roster that landed on top of the podium in Knoxville, Tennessee, on Oct. 31 featured only two of the 21 athletes and none of the top seven runners from the 2023 Gators.
Despite a nearly total overhaul of the roster, associate head coach Will Palmer has found the same success at the conference level and is positioned to improve upon a program-best fifth-place finish at the NCAA Championships from two seasons ago. The similarities between the two teams extend beyond the results page, however, and reach deep into the cultures of the lineups.
“They’re two very different groups of people,” redshirt sophomore Kate Drummond said. “But I feel like the same energy is there between everyone. Everyone is there for each other, and that’s how the 2023 team was perceived in my eyes.”
Drummond and redshirt junior Breanna Stuart are the sole representatives of both title-winning teams. In their time at UF, they’ve seen a roster be built from the ground up, only for the whole process to repeat itself 10 months later.
The summer of 2023 was Palmer’s first offseason at the helm of the Gators after coming to Gainesville from a successful stint at Alabama. Over the course of a few months, he targeted the transfer portal for key pieces to build a roster that could bring Florida to the national meet — a place it had only been once in the last decade.
“That was just like a mad scramble,” Palmer said. “It was like someone took a bunch of balls and threw them in the air. You’re kind of bewildered and you’re just like, ‘Okay, let me catch as many as I can.’”
The scramble proved fruitful for the Gators, as four of their five SEC scorers came to the program through the transfer portal that summer: senior Flomena Asekol and junior Allison Wilson from Alabama, and redshirt seniors Amelia Mazza-Downie and Elise Thorner from New Mexico. Redshirt junior Parker Valby, the SEC and eventual NCAA champion, rounded out the title-winning quintet.
Wilson was the only member of 2023’s top five to return the next fall. To avoid being a one-season wonder, Palmer once again turned toward the portal for reinforcements. However, now with another year under his belt in Gainesville, Palmer was also able to get a stronger foothold in recruiting.
“The biggest difference is I know the team a lot better,” Palmer said. “I knew UF a lot better, as well, and every place is a little unique, and so I had a better idea of how the recruiting mechanisms work here.”
While third- and 12th-place finishes on the SEC and national stages, respectively, were strong showings for the Gators in 2024, last year’s campaign was truly more of a transitional year. In August, Palmer said that inexperience and newness to both the program and the NCAA was a hurdle that many athletes had to wrestle with. This fall, Florida is reaping the benefits of consecutive excellent offseasons that have constructed a standout, veteran-led squad.
“I’m not gonna say that’s been easy because it’s a challenge every year,” Palmer said, “but we’ve kind of been in a flow state.”
Each of Florida’s top seven runners from this season’s conference title win came to the program during the 2024 or 2025 offseasons. Seniors Hilda Olemomoi, Tia Wilson, and Beth Morley, as well as sophomore Reagan Gilmore came in 2024, while sophomore Judy Chepkoech and freshmen Desma Chepkoech and Claire Stegall came the most recent offseason.
For all that the championship squads share in how the team was crafted and the success they have achieved, the path to those results has been varied.
In 2023, Valby was a metaphorical buzzsaw on her way to national glory, with all but one of her four races being decided by at least 10 seconds. Asekol was a strong counterpart, but depth proved to be an issue on the national stage. When Mazza-Downie dropped out of the NCAA Championship race just over halfway through, it meant the Gators’ fifth scorer went from placing 75th to 202nd, effectively killing any hope of a podium finish. Had Mazza-Downie been able to replicate her 22nd-place finish from a year earlier, Florida would have claimed the first cross country title in program history.
At this year’s SEC Championship, Florida showed that there’s more than enough nationally-competitive athletes on the roster to withstand an unforeseen injury. Gilmore’s 18th-place finish was a spot ahead of where the Gators’ fifth-scorer finished in 2023, and Stegall (26th place) and Morley (31st) both finished ahead of the 2023 squad’s sixth runner.
Florida’s depth was brought to the forefront even more at the NCAA South Regional meet, where Gilmore and Desma Chepkoech rested. In their absence, Stegall and Morley stepped up, finishing 15th and 22nd, respectively. Even without two of their top five runners, the Gators total of 52 points was barely above what they had scored two weeks earlier and still almost half of what second-place Tennessee managed.
“In this sport, low score wins,” Palmer said. “The person scoring the most points is your fifth runner, so the more and more people you have to be able to step in and play that role, the better.”
Palmer sees each team form individual identities as the season progresses. Two years ago, the throughline was an overwhelming sense of excitement over a new coach and an almost entirely new roster. In this rendition of the Gators, Palmer sees a group that has had to “struggle a little bit, in a really good way.” Overcoming these struggles and still finding themselves on the precipice of becoming one of the greatest teams in program history is why this season is characterized as the team’s butterfly year.
“We all are our own butterflies, in a sense,” Stuart said. “We all come out of our cocoons at different times with the way our strengths may differ from other people.”
The culminating step in Florida’s historic 2025 season is the NCAA Cross Country National Championship, held in Columbia, Missouri, on Nov. 22.
Contact Paul Hof-Mahoney at phof-mahoney@alligator.org. Follow him on X at @phofmahoney.
Paul is a senior sports journalism student and is the cross country/track and field reporter in his third semester with The Alligator. In his free time, you can catch him scrolling Twitter to keep up with an endless flood of track results and training for the media 800-meter race at the World Athletics Championships.
