Schedule quirks are the norm in 2021. The Florida women have a schedule that’s particularly unique.

The Gators opened their season with seven straight road games and are set to open a six-game homestand on Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern against Cincinnati. Florida, ranked 13th in the Nike/US Lacrosse Division I Women’s Top 20, came out of that stretch of road games relatively unscathed.

A loss to top-ranked North Carolina can certainly be forgiven, and while a 12-11 loss at Jacksonville at first looked like an upset, the Dolphins have since proven with a win over Virginia Tech that they could be for real.

The Gators bounced back to beat a tough Temple team twice in Philadelphia, opening AAC play on a high note.

“I’m just really proud of our team,” coach Amanda O’Leary said. “With COVID protocols, travel has been much different than in the past. There’s a lot of due diligence put in. We’re taking two busses to the airport. All meals are brought into the hotels.”

Outside of a COVID-19 pause that forced the program to shut down for about two weeks in late February, Florida’s schedule has gone off without a hitch. Some of the usual out-of-conference games against Big Ten and ACC foes went unscheduled because of travel restrictions, but O’Leary credited assisted Taryn VanThof for whipping up “a really great schedule.”

“For us, I think our administration understood that most of the games we’re going to have play will be on the road,” O’Leary said. “They made a commitment to us that whatever we needed to do to compete and play as many of the top teams as we could, they were fully supportive. When you have that support from the top down, it just makes your job as a coach a heck of a lot easier.”

Last year’s abbreviated season was an up-and-down experience for the young Gators which started underclassmen in a majority of positions around the field. Call that a trial by fire, but it served as a crash course in Division I college lacrosse for a group that entered this spring with high expectations.

Those young players have an added year under their belts and still get to play with the likes of Shannon Kavanagh, Cara Trombetta, Grace Haus and Brianna Harris, so the Gators have that enviable mix of youth and experience.

“There’s been significant improvement,” O’Leary said. “We were lucky that we had a full fall, and I think that boded well for us. You can see it on the field. We now have three, possibly four, freshmen starting every game. Each game, they’re getting better and better and getting more confidence.”