Florida was bounced from the Men’s College World Series on Wednesday evening in a shutout loss to Texas A&M. But despite leaving Omaha without any hardware, the Gators can take away plenty from their time there.
In particular, Florida has a bevy of young pitchers that were leaned on late in the year and who will return for another season in 2025. Head coach Kevin O’Sullivan is among those hopeful that this run can be a catalyst for the necessary year-to-year improvements.
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“Well, hopefully it’s like a normal progression that you see from year to year,” O’Sullivan said. “We have got a couple freshmen that have grown up, so to speak, but there’s some more growth that has to happen. But there was some tremendous improvements and hopefully this experience out here, going through the rigors of the SEC, hopefully will push them to another level next year because we’re going to have — we’re obviously going to have to have them make one more jump.”
O’Sullivan praised the 2024 Gators for their efforts in Omaha
This season marked the 10th time that Florida head coach Kevin O’Sullivan has led the Gators to Omaha, but it looked a lot different compared to years past. And after the tough loss, he spoke on what his biggest takeaway was from this year’s team.
“Well, I think for future teams, if we ever are in this situation again, we’re struggling a little bit halfway through the year, whatever — I’ve been through it now, right? So I’ve got some experiences, I got some lessons that I’ve learned along the way,” O’Sullivan explained.
The Gators’ returning players next season will definitely come back to The Swamp with more resiliency and toughness. As O’Sullivan watched his team fight through adversity throughout the season both on and off the field.
“This team never quit,” O’Sullivan said. “There’s a lot of people that said a lot of negative things about us this year and, you know, we kind of deserved it at times. We didn’t play as well as we should. But these guys stayed the course and it’s not that they believed what they were hearing, but it’s just a different world we live in with social media and so much access to different platforms as far as what the players hear.”
Florida needed to win their final series of the regular season on the road against Georgia to even make it to the NCAA Tournament, doing so against a squad that hosted a Regionals and Supers this postseason. But what they’d faced when they did enter the NCAA Tournament challenged them even more, yet they constantly responded game after game.
“But to get them to a point where we were fighting two things, like I said. I repeated it over and over. We were fighting the .500 mark and fighting the SEC mark, and what they did is nothing short of remarkable,” O’Sullivan admitted. “To have to go to Georgia and win two out of three, and then go to Stillwater, and go to Clemson, and then lose a really tough game on Saturday, and then we end up beating NC State by a run. And the game obviously this morning against Kentucky, another national seed. I mean, we accomplished an awful lot.”
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