Mike Holloway has led the Gators to a dozen NCAA championships.
Harry Fodder: Holloway's Championship Way
Tuesday, June 13, 2023 | Men's Track and Field, Women's Track and Field, Chris Harry
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By: Chris Harry, Senior Writer
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – In 2005, Mike Holloway and his Florida track team were headed back to the hotel after the NCAA championship meet in Sacramento, Calif. The Gators had finished with the runner-up trophy, just like they had at the indoor meet a few months before and just like they had at both the indoor and outdoor meets the year before that. Holloway, as was habit, called his mother to check in and update her.
Before he could even reveal the results, Nelvina Holloway asked her son what was wrong.
The Gators were second again, he said.
Then came the lecture. Make that life lesson.
"OK, the next time just be 10th," she shot back, much to her son's confusion. "There's a lot of people that would want to be second. So maybe you should be blessed and happy and understand that there's a lot people who would love to be in your position, so stop complaining. If you want to be first, you should work harder."
Nelvina Holloway died last November, but her legacy was very much alive with her son, better known as "Mouse," as he told that story during a small gathering with media Tuesday afternoon near his offices at the Lemerand Center, now home to 14 NCAA championship trophies, including the 2023 men's hardware the Gators won Friday night in Austin, Texas, which was the 13th for the program on Holloway's watch.
Oh yeah. Eight of those are second-place pieces of hardware, including the 2023 women trophy, are in there, also.
For perspective, UF won it's 47th all-time national championships in all its sports. Holloway is responsible for 27.7 percent of them.
Each title has been different in its own way, most obviously with the changing faces of the student-athletes. It never gets old seeing a new kid, be it a transfer or maybe a freshman, celebrating a championship for the first time. The same can be said for a second, third, fourth or fifth time alongside assistant coaches and support staffers Holloway pegs as the best in the country. Who would dare argue?
— Gators Track and Field & Cross Country (@GatorsTF) June 13, 2023
The program's remarkable run of success, which includes a sweep of both the men's and women's championships in 2022, is rooted, Holloway said, in an uncompromising business model that traces to his days coaching track about six miles away at Buchholz High School.
He cited the legendary John Wooden, whose UCLA basketball players would return to the school 20 years after the fact and see the current players doing the same thing they did two decades before. That's the Holloway model. He's not changing.
Even uses a stopwatch still.
"Everybody understands, from me down to the student equipment managers, how we do things here," he said.
It's all geared for performance in June. It's not that Holloway doesn't like winning Southeastern Conference championships too (he's got 13 of those, by the way), it's just that his system of tapering is geared toward the NCAA meet. That's why back in February, when the Gators finished sixth at the SEC meet, there was no panic whatsoever in the program.
"This is not the first time we've done this. We do this a lot," Holloway, now 64, said of his team's late-season surge to the outdoors meet. "At the end of the day, our plan and our goal is always to be at our best at the end of the national championships."
That was literally the case Friday when Florida had to win the 4x400 relay – the very last event of the meet – and Arkansas had to be no better than fourth for the Gators to clinch. If that seemed like a tall task, consider the Gators foursome of Emmanuel Bamidele, Jacory Patterson, Jevaughn Powell and Ryan Willie had already set the NCAA record at the SEC Championship meet.
They broke the mark again in the finals to run away with the team title (though not before Holloway had "a conversation" with Willie about not sprinting full to the finish line and barely holding off his Arizona State counterpart). So add yet another one to the crowded trophy case in the Lemerand, which is scheduled to undergo a major renovation and facelift after completion of a $4.1 million upgrade currently underway at Percy Beard Track. A bigger trophy case better be in the new "Mouse House" blueprints.
Florida track is a runaway train.
UF coach Mike Holloway gets the water-bucket treatment after winning the 2023 NCAA men's championship Friday night.
"We brought the trophies with us from Austin, but everything stays there. We're not defending anything next year 'cause no one is coming here to take that championship from us," Holloway said. "Plus, this is my job. When I sit in a living room or when parents come here on our campus and I promise them and their children that I'm going to work to make them the best in the world – not just the best on this campus or in the country – I'm a man of my word. That's how my mom and dad raised me. My dad told me at a very young age, you have a job and you have to do it your very best. When you can't, you walk away."
And what would Mom tell him now?
"She would tell me she was proud of me," Holloway said. "Then she would immediately tell me she wanted me to get some rest and to call her tomorrow."
Before he could even reveal the results, Nelvina Holloway asked her son what was wrong.
