No All-Florida Invite, But Otherwise Familiar Schedule for Gators This Season

It’s a new era in Gainesville, both with the departure of longtime coach Gregg Troy and the subsequent splitting the program into separate men’s and women’s programs, as well as the loss of a great senior class, led by Caeleb Dressel, for the men.  Yet, with one big exception, the Florida Gators will have a pretty familiar schedule for the 2018-2019 season.

Rather than hosting the All-Florida Invite, as they have in recent years, both teams will begin the season by traveling to other teams in Florida. The men and women will both kick off the season by heading to Florida Atlantic September 27th.  The men get the rest of the weekend off, while the women will also swim at Miami and Florida Gulf Coast the following two days.

From there the Gators will travel across the Gulf to Baton Rouge, LA, to take on conference rivals LSU the second weekend in October.

The next week Florida will be competing against Indiana and Texas in Austin, continuing a series that has become a regular occurrence over the past few seasons.  In some ways it’ll be a rematch of last year’s NCAA men’s championships, where Florida hung in with Texas and Indiana (along with Cal and NC State) for the first few days, making it one of the craziest NCAA championships we’ve seen in a while.

SEC competition will continue with meets at Georgia (October 26th) and Florida State (November 2nd), as the Gators start prepping for their fall taper meets.

First, they’ll head to Atlanta, GA, for the Georgia Tech Invite in mid-November.  Next, their schedule also lists the USA Swimming Winter Nationals in Greensboro, although presumably only a portion of each team would attend that meet.

The Gators will kick off the new calendar year by hosting Kentucky and Ohio State at home the first weekend in January.  They’ll then travel to Auburn the last weekend in January before hosting Tennessee for their final home meet of the year in February.

For the men, the UNC Invite appears it’ll be the final meet for those swimmers who don’t make the SEC roster, while the Ohio State Invite will function the same for the women.

Both men and women will compete at the SEC Championships in Athens, GA, February 19th-23rd, and the Gators will host a last chance meet the final weekend.

Finally, any swimmers making the NCAA championships will head to Austin Texas for the women’s (3/20-3/23) and men’s (3/27-3/30) meets to wrap up the year.

Full Schedule: