The last time the Gators hit the track, it’s safe to say things didn’t break their way. Not only did the men’s and women’s squads suffer their respective worst finishes in SEC Indoor Championships history, but only one athlete outside the national qualifying bubble broke into the Top 16.
The bad news didn’t end for Florida once the team left College Station, Texas. Junior sprinter Wanya McCoy, who qualified for the NCAA Indoor Championships in the 60- and 200-meters, was forced to relinquish his spot after suffering a leg injury in the SEC 200-meter final.
Redshirt senior Jenoah McKiver, a standout in the 400-meters, didn’t race at SEC Indoors while nursing a lower back injury. The hope was that he’d be good to go by this weekend, heading to the national meet as the fourth-fastest qualifier in the 400-meters, but he was a late scratch when official start lists were released Wednesday morning.
Despite the unlucky streak, the Gators still have five entries traveling to Virginia Beach, Virginia, at the end of this week to vie for national glory. While they likely won’t be able to replicate Florida’s top three team finishes from 2024, here’s how the five individuals and one relay team stack up on the national stage.
Men’s 4x400-meter relay
Final: Saturday, 7:20 p.m.
The Florida relay team has always posed a threat whenever championship season rolls around, as it has secured first-team All-American honors at every NCAA Indoor Championship since 2016. However, UF hasn’t won a national title on the banked track since 2005.
The injuries to McCoy and McKiver do put a cap on this team, but the Gators still managed a fourth-place finish at SEC Indoors. The SECs squad consisted of freshman Vance Nilsson, sophomores Rios Prude Jr. and Malique Smith-Band, and senior Ashton Schwartzman.
Senior Auhmad Robinson and his NCAA-leading Texas A&M squad will be the team to beat. The Aggies ran the fastest time across the last two seasons, 3:02.21, at the Tiger Paw Invitational last month before winning SEC gold. Other notable teams include defending champions Arizona State, who come into the meet seeded fourth, and USC.
Beth Morley, women’s mile
Semifinal: Friday, 3:30 p.m.
A Gator hasn’t won the NCAA crown in the indoor mile or outdoor 1,500 meters since Charlotte Browning won both in 2010. If Morley wants to break this streak, she’ll need to beat out the fastest mile field in collegiate history.
For the first time ever, all 16 women who will toe the line at the NCAA Indoor Championships have run under 4:30. If Morley, a junior transfer from Loughborough University in England, had run her personal best of 4:26.76 last season, she would have been the sixth-fastest woman in collegiate history. Instead, she’s only the 12th in 2025.
Like McKiver, Morley opted not to race at the SEC Championships after dealing with a minor injury, but she’ll be ready to compete with the nation’s best this weekend.
Leading the way is Oregon junior Şilan Ayyildiz, who shaved almost a full second off the collegiate record last month when she ran 4:23.46 in Boston, the same race where Morley ran her personal best. Seven of the 16 national qualifiers ran their qualifying marks at the David Hemery Valentine Invitational on Feb. 15, with six of them coming from the same heat. Another name to keep an eye on is Portland senior Laura Pellicoro, who took a two-second win over a field that included several pros in Washington with an eye-popping 4:25.60 clocking.
Hilda Olemomoi, women’s 5,000-meters
Final: Friday, 4:42 p.m.
To say that junior Hilda Olemomoi had big shoes to fill when she transferred from Alabama over the summer is an understatement. She came to Gainesville fresh off runner-up finishes in the 5,000- and 10,000-meters at the NCAA Outdoor Championships, but was stepping into the wake of the woman who held her off in both races: The Bowerman winner, Parker Valby.
As she now sits on the precipice of her second national championship meet as a Gator, the Kenya native has lived up to expectations. She finished third at the NCAA Cross Country Championships in November and became the third-fastest woman in NCAA history in the indoor 5,000 meters in her track opener back in December. Olemomoi just missed the cut for the 3,000 meters, but she’ll head to Virginia to take on a historically great field over 25 laps of the banked oval.
Just as she was in the cross country season and has been on the track to this point of the season, Alabama sophomore Doris Lemngole will be Olemomoi’s chief competitor. The teammates-turned-rivals grew up in counties separated by about 140 miles in Kenya and have produced stellar battles each time they’ve matched up since the fall. In all but one of those races, Lemngole has gotten the better of Olemomoi. She beat out Florida’s star in the December 5,000-meter race, snatching Valby’s collegiate record in the process. These two always bring out the best in each other, but Olemomoi might need better than her best to make it back-to-back NCAA titles in this event for Florida.
Anthaya Charlton, women’s long jump
Final: Friday, 3:30 p.m.
Prior to conference championship weekend, Charlton would have been a shoo-in favorite to become the third Gator to win a women’s long jump national title, indoors or out. That’s the respect you earn when you open your season at 6.98 meters, a mark only Gator Great Jasmine Moore has surpassed indoors as a collegian. This performance sent an emphatic statement that the Bahamian junior had come to play in 2025.
“She’s just been a different human from last year,” Florida jumps coach Nic Petersen said. “She committed herself in the fall to coming in and working hard and making some changes. You’re seeing those results come to fruition.”
However, Charlton hasn’t quite maintained that momentum in her last two meets. She finished fifth at the Razorback Invitational before taking home a fourth-place finish at SEC Indoors. To get back on track in Virginia, it’ll require a focus on execution to build consistency.
“For her, jumping 6.98 in some way put different thoughts and pressures in her own brain,” Petersen said. “It’s just getting her to understand that execution is the only thing you can control… Not worrying about anything else other than executing what you’re doing on the runway, and we’ll get a big number.”
There’s one thing that separates Charlton from the rest of the nation and fuels her sky-high potential: her pure, unadulterated speed. In her freshman year at Kentucky, she qualified for the outdoor national championships in the 100 meters and picked up two points for the Gators at the SEC Championships two weeks ago in the 60 meters.
“99% of the time, the person that wins the long jump is the person that runs the fastest,” Petersen said. “When you’re one of the fastest girls in the world, it makes jumping far a little easier.”
If the Charlton who shows up in Virginia is in the same form we saw from the one in Arkansas six weeks ago, the only woman in the country who can hang with her is Illinois’s Tacoria Humphery. The senior from Indianapolis posted a huge jump of 6.94 meters to win the Big Ten crown two weeks ago.
Asia Phillips, women’s triple jump
Final: Saturday, 2:20 p.m.
Phillips, a freshman from Ontario, Canada, proved true championship mettle in College Station two weeks ago. At not only her first collegiate championship meet of any kind, but also sitting on the bubble for national qualification, she produced her best performance since arriving in Gainesville. Her 13.38-meter effort was enough to punch a ticket to Virginia as the 15th overall qualifier.
“The message was… ‘You’re prepared, you’ve been training great, go execute,’” Petersen said. “If you go in there trying to jump really far, that doesn’t always go very well.”
A stage of this caliber is nothing new to Phillips, who finished fourth at the World Junior (under-20) Championships in Lima, Peru, in August. She’ll be the only freshman competing in a tight national field. While she enters the competition seeded 15th, a jump at or around her personal best of 13.55 meters could vault her into scoring and first-team All-American contention.
“I don’t think she feels the pressure that she has to go in and win or anything like that,” Petersen said. “There’s a little bit of freedom in, ‘I’m just gonna go execute. I’m gonna go try and do what I’ve been doing in practice and watch a jump go out there, and I’m gonna go compete’... That’s really been our focus.”
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.
