Girls Overall Team Rankings — Week 1

The best returning five in the state, and it is not especially close: Taylor Lawhon, Camila Giles, Jillian Jakab and the McEnany sisters averaged 19:10.6 at the state meet inside a 1:36 spread. Converted forward, that is a 19:39.4 team average with the same spread — better than anything that actually ran this weekend.

Our preseason projection had Bishop Kenny first in 3A at 49 points, the lowest projected score of any girls team in Florida in any class. Nothing that happened Friday or Saturday challenged it, because nothing that happened Friday or Saturday involved them.

They are also the team with the most to lose from this method, in the sense that they have proved nothing since November and are being ranked first on that basis. First is what the evidence says. The evidence is nine months old.

The best team in Florida that can prove it.

19:47.8 average, 1:16 spread — the tightest one-through-five of any ranked team, and the tightest of anyone in Florida averaging under 21:00. Riley Marise 19:17, Anais Almonte 19:18, Harmony Holland 19:43, Lola Jackson 20:08, Carolina Ramos 20:33.

And the fact that makes them the most interesting team on this list: Marise is 30th in the merged field. Niceville ranks second without a single runner inside the top 25, and does it with one returner from the 2025 state meet. They are not in our preseason team projections at all — they did not have the returning bodies to project.

Every other team in the top four is running roughly the group it was expected to run. Niceville built a new one.

The best five-man average in Florida at 19:40.0 and third on the list, which is the argument for scoring rather than averaging in a single line.

Eva Delaney 18:57, Emma Godfrey 19:08, Ivey Edgell 19:16, Hadleigh Roberts 19:30 — four girls inside 19:30, more than any team in the state, projected or otherwise. Then Elena Schultz at 21:29 and a 2:32 spread.

Note that Creekside now sits ahead of Chiles. On the raced-only version of this list Chiles was second and Creekside third. Dropping five projected teams into the field rewards a deep top four more than it rewards a tight pack, and the two of them swapped. Take the eight points between them as noise.

19:45.4 average with the best front pair of any team that raced: Emma-Claire Tanenbaum 18:48 and Kaia Ables 18:59, ninth and seventeenth in the merged field. Then 65 seconds of nothing to Charlotte Sikes at 20:04, and a 1:52 spread.

Projected second in 3A at 65 points, ranked fourth overall, and now looking up at a Bishop Kenny team it has not raced.

Six returners averaging 19:26.0 at state inside 1:35.8, converting to 19:54.8. Kate Brice 19:05.6 leads, and the class rank is the headline: projected first in 2A at 50 points, in a class where the best team that actually raced — Bolles — sits sixteenth overall.

2A is the class where sitting out costs the least, because there is nobody in it running fast enough in August to make the absence look like a risk.

Projected first in 4A at 93 points, and the deepest projected roster in the state at seven returners. Alba Antunez-Perez converts to 18:49.1 — tenth in the scoring field — with Lailani Levy at 19:11.0 behind her.

Then a 2:20 spread to a fifth runner at 21:09.3, which is why the No. 1 team in 4A on paper is sixth overall here. Spanish River's problem is the same as Creekside's and Vanguard's, and unlike them they have not had a chance to show it is fixed.

Annabella Tomasic converts to 18:04.3, the fastest runner in the entire scoring field, projected or raced. She ran 17:35.5 at state as a freshman.

Then 19:45.9, 20:14.4, 20:31.1, 20:44.9, and a 2:40.6 spread that is the widest of any team in the top ten. Bishop Moore is a great runner and a good team, and this ranking cannot tell you which of those two things showed up over the summer.

The most balanced team that raced: Sofia Jimenez 19:21, Alessandra Perez 19:43, Marisa Mantecon 19:52, then 20:50 and 21:06 for a 1:45 spread.

Also the most crowded address in Florida. 3A now contains Bishop Kenny, Chiles, Bishop Moore and Lourdes in the overall top eight, plus Dillard, Vanguard and Ponte Vedra behind them. Lourdes was projected fourth in that class. They are still fourth in it.

The team nobody has been talking about. Six returners, 19:46.2 state average, a 1:36.1 spread, and a projected 2A rank of second behind Episcopal at 83 points. Daniela Hernandez converts to 19:14.0.

Two of the top nine teams in Florida are 2A schools that did not race. That is the strangest fact this exercise turned up.

The biggest riser on the girls' side, and the best case for why racing matters. Nease was our twelfth-ranked 4A team at 293 projected points — had they sat out, this method would have entered them at a 21:30.8 average and ranked them somewhere in the thirties.

They raced instead, and went 19:33, 19:55, 20:07, 20:52, 21:24: a 20:22.2 average, a 1:51 spread, and tenth in Florida. Their boys were second in the state. Whatever happened at Nease this summer was not gender-specific.