2018 Miss Florida is Taylor Tyson from Jupiter

The 2018 winner of the Miss Florida Pageant is 23-year-old Taylor Tyson from Jupiter. She will now go on to Atlantic City to represent the Sunshine State in the 2019 Miss America Pageant set for September 9th.

The event was held for the third year in a row in Lakeland for the third year at the lovely RP Center’s Youkey Theatre. She is a proud graduate of Florida Atlantic and is presently attending Stetson Law School.

The event covered five days where young 40 young women competed in preliminary rounds including eveningwear, fitness and lifestyle, talent and interview categories.

In the end there were ten semifinalists that included Miss Winter Haven Morgan Boykin, an agriculture communications major who’s dual-enrolled at Hillsborough Community College and the University of South Florida, and Miss Florida Citrus Megan Price of LaBelle, a student at Florida Southern College majoring in multimedia journalism and sports communication and marketing. Neither was among the five finalists.

The runners up were Miss Orlando, Miss Sarasota, and Miss Tallahassee.

Despite the Miss America Pageant organizers announced last month that the swimsuit competition will no longer be a part of the national contest, but the Miss Florida organizers decided to keep it as part of this year’s event. Pageant organizers felt that it was only fitting that in the Sunshine State the swimsuit competition a tradition that they wanted to keep and there were no complaints from any of the contestants.

In a special event held before the main event, Jessica Sales of Orlando was named Florida’s Outstanding Teen from among 36 contestants statewide ages 13-17. Along with her crown, presented to Sales by Florida’s 2017 Outstanding Teen Reece Weaver of Jacksonville, Sales was given $1,800 in scholarship money and a prize package totaling more than $25,000. She will move on to compete in the national Miss America’s Outstanding Teen competition July 28 in Orlando.

Jim Williams is the Washington Bureau Chief, Digital Director as well as the Director of Special Projects for Genesis Communications. He is starting his third year as part of the team. This is Williams 40th year in the media business, and in that time he has served in a number of capacities. He is a seven time Emmy Award winning television producer, director, writer and executive. He has developed four regional sports networks, directed over 2,000 live sporting events including basketball, football, baseball hockey, soccer and even polo to name a few sports. Major events include three Olympic Games, two World Cups, two World Series, six NBA Playoffs, four Stanley Cup Playoffs, four NCAA Men’s National Basketball Championship Tournaments (March Madness), two Super Bowl and over a dozen college bowl games. On the entertainment side Williams was involved s and directed over 500 concerts for Showtime, Pay Per View and MTV Networks.