No. 20 Florida Soccer Faces Road Test vs. Florida Atlantic
Florida soccer hasn’t cracked the rankings in five years. Yet, they knocked off a defending national champion. Its new coach is off to one of the best starts in the country. Its top scorer collected three national honors in a single week.
Now the Gators pack their early success and take it on the road, for another in-state rivalry game that hasn’t been revived since their dramatic 2019 overtime contest.
No. 20 Florida (3-1) heads to Boca Raton to face Florida Atlantic (1-2-1) at FAU Soccer Stadium. The Gators have won three straight, including a 3-1 win over defending NCAA champion Florida State on Aug. 23 that snapped the Seminoles’ 36-match non-conference win streak.
Senior forward Kyra Taylor has been at the center of it all. She scored twice in back-to-back matches and swept SEC, IWSOC and TopDrawerSoccer.com national player of the week honors.
Coach Nick Zimmerman, back in his home state after seven seasons on staff at Mississippi State, has UF rolling. A 6-0 rout of Jacksonville on Thursday punctuated a two-win week.
FAU, meanwhile, heads into Sunday’s game coming off of its own statement win; a 7-0 home demolition of Howard. Florida has never lost to the Owls in its 24-year history, boasting a 7-0-1 record against them all-time.
Zimmerman’s rebuild is off to one of the fastest starts among the nation’s new head coaches this season. He arrived from Mississippi State with seven transfers in tow — a group that combined for 17 goals, half the Bulldogs’ scoring output in 2025.
Thursday’s win over Jacksonville produced a wave of firsts: Iori Watanabe’s first collegiate goal, Katie Johnston’s first free-kick goal and the program’s first shutout of the season.
Zimmerman pointed to that scoring balance as a defining trait of his group.
“The beautiful thing about the way that we play is anyone can score on any given night,” he said. “It’s not just one player that we’re relying on.”
The last time Florida hit the road, it couldn’t hold on. The Gators led UCF 2-0 at halftime on Aug. 13 in Orlando for their season opener, then let it slip away in a 4-3 loss.
Senior forward Zoe Main hasn’t let the team forget the defeat.
“The result isn’t our biggest priority — it’s more of the performance, and we didn’t have the performance we wanted in that game,” Main said. “This is a really big game for us to show that we’ve improved from that last performance on the road.”
Florida Atlantic presents a different kind of challenge. The Owls were picked 10th in the American Conference’s preseason poll after a 4-12-3 season in 2025.
Still, they’ve shown fight in nonconference play, tying Florida International and battling Florida State before falling 3-0, prior to shutting out Howard Thursday.
History favors the Gators heavily. Florida has never lost to FAU in eight meetings.
Zimmerman isn’t leaning on any of that history. “The next game is the most important game,” he said, “and that’s against a good FAU team on the road.”
Category: Feature Sports News, Gator Sports, Gators Soccer
