Harry Fodder: Getting to Know You

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Walter Clayton Jr., one of a bevy of new guys to take up locker room residency in the Hugh Hathcock Basketball Complex this summer, had a little more advance knowledge of the Florida Gators than most of his fellow incoming transfers and freshmen. 
 
The 6-foot-2 junior guard came to UF from Iona, but grew up in Lake Wales, Fla., and has always followed the Gators. Clayton knew the ups and downs of UF’s first season under Todd Golden. He knew junior wing Will Richard could shoot and play defense. He’d watched highlights of some of the other transfers, but admitted the tape could only provide limited intel.

Clayton, though, knew all about guard Riley Kugel, the sophomore guard who bypassed the NBA underclassmen evaluation process during the spring to return and build on his Southeastern Conference All-Freshman season. Clayton, in fact, had been well aware of Kugel’s athleticism, shooting and shot-making for some time now. 
 
“We played their team when we were in high school, but I was hurt and couldn’t play,” Clayton said this week, recalling the matchup between his Bartow Class 6A squad and Kugel’s Class 7A Orlando Dr. Phillips team, both of which won state championships in 2021. “They won by 10.” 
 
Clayton had one more thought on that game that he wasn’t about to keep to himself. 
 
“We would’ve won if I’d played,” he added, with a smile. “I remind him of that every day. He and Zell.” 
 
That would be “Zell,” as in sophomore guard Denzel Aberdeen, who ran point on that Dr. Phillips club and also is one of Clayton’s new UF teammates. As it turns out, Kugel, Aberdeen, Richard and sophomore forward Aleks Szymczyk are the lone Gator leftovers from Golden’s debut squad that went 16-17 and lost in the first round of the National Invitational Tournament. 
 

In the months that followed the program’s first losing campaign since 2015, Golden and his staff commenced a rebuild that has brought seven new faces into the gym, with another one due in Sunday and yet another later in the summer. The new Gators began trickling into the facility in May and early June and now are in the second full-blown week of NCAA-allotted offseason workouts, with rules permitting four hours of team practices and individual drills per week, in addition to weight-room and conditioning under strength coach Victor Lopez. 
 
“We knew we had issues that we needed to address,” Golden said Thursday. “I think we’ve done a decent job addressing those issues, plain and simple.”
 
In this new (but becoming normalized) college basketball world of multiple transfers and annual mega-roster turnover (when everyone shows up, Florida will have six transfers and three freshmen) practices and pick-up games during the summer become even more important to developing chemistry, on and off the floor. 
 
“We definitely have a lot of guys who fit what the coaches want to do this year,” said Richard,…