Florida’s soccer team began the 2019-20 campaign with five straight games on the road over a 16-day span. In that period, the Gators suffered three consecutive defeats to ranked opponents and lost junior forward Deanne Rose to a hamstring injury against then-No.5 Southern California on Aug. 29.
After I got home from covering Florida football’s 45-0 throttling Tennessee-Martin, something much more entertaining popped up on my Twitter timeline.
Early season contests against FCS teams can be tough to evaluate. Game plans are dumbed down, young players are constantly rotating in and, above all, the weak competition presents little opportunity for an honest appraisal of the team.
Florida volleyball walked into its match as the seventh-ranked team in the country, but the game itself told a different story: No. 8 Minnesota swept the Gators in the Golden Gophers’ home-opener Saturday night.
Florida’s victory over Miami two weeks ago wasn’t pretty.
One pass changed everything.
It took Florida more than a quarter of football to find the end zone against Tennessee-Martin.
Florida is a team rich with history and annual national championship expectations. Given such lofty standards, this weekend proved rather disappointing for the Gators men’s golf team.
Redshirt junior midfielder Parker Roberts stepped up to the penalty spot and saw someone she hadn’t seen all night: backup Florida State goalkeeper Brooke Bollinger.
The No. 7 Gators won’t have much time to recover from their home-opener loss against No. 1 Stanford. Florida volleyball is back in action on the road against No. 8 Minnesota Saturday evening at 8.
The stakes for Florida’s home opener against Tennesse-Martin are drastically different from those surrounding its season opener two weeks ago. But the importance of what is essentially a tuneup game against an FCS opponent cannot be understated after the Gators’ blunders in their win over Miami.
Florida’s soccer team returned from Los Angeles late Sunday night after a winless weekend. Then-No. 1 Florida State was in LA as well over the weekend and left with two losses against UCLA and Southern California.
Week 1 is officially in the books, and it was a doozy.
Last season, then-junior Sierra Brooks torched the rest of the field on her way to a seven-stroke individual victory at the Cougar Classic. Rounds of 65 and 62 – the latter setting a course record – also led Florida to a team victory in its annual season opener in South Carolina.
There’s a lot we still don’t know about Florida’s football team.
It’s been 293 days since Florida football hosted an opponent in the Swamp.
It wasn’t disastrous, per se, but it certainly wasn’t pretty either.
One team had just lost to the No. 5-ranked USC Trojans. The other had just beaten the No.1-ranked Florida State Seminoles.
It took two sets and a must-win situation, but Florida’s volleyball team found its way to a five-set win over the Dayton Flyers Saturday night in Louisville, Kentucky, in nailbiter fashion.
It was a game that Florida had been anticipating for eight months. The experienced, freshmen-less team could finally get its season underway.
Solutions by The State News
