It’s a good sign when you’ve built a women’s basketball program so strong that just making it to the tournament is an underachievement.

Such was the case for the Georgia women’s basketball team this past season. By its standards, Georgia’s loss in the first round of the NCAA tournament wasn’t something it’s used to.

“I think as a coach you always expect more and you want more and you aspire for more,” head coach Andy Landers said. “I don’t like to use the word ‘expect’ a whole lot. I intended on it to be more, but I realized that we were going into a situation that was going to be different.”

It was going in a different direction because of several things that were out of the team’s control. The first major difference in the Lady Bulldogs was that four time All-American Tasha Humphrey had graduated. Also, post-player Nicole Stroud’s career officially ended after a knee injury, which cut the rotation down to only eight players for Landers.

“I think the thing that hurt us in a lot of ways was the number [of players] because as a coach your options are very few,” he said.

Still, Georgia would put up a fight in bigger games – evident in wins over Auburn, Vanderbilt and Florida. But there were bad losses to Arkansas and Detroit.

“On nights it almost appeared that we had a higher desire to play and compete than on other nights,” Landers said. “If there is a word to sum up [the season] in retrospect, it would probably be inconsistent.”

But don’t feel that Georgia will be down for too long. Next season’s recruiting class is ranked in the top 5 and will be headlined by McDonald’s All-American Jasmine Hassell and Georgia’s Gatorade high school basketball player of the year, Anne Marie Armstrong.

“Next year will be more of a rebuilding year than this year because you are going to be infusing new blood into the program,” Landers said. “We’ll be a very young and inexperienced basketball team. The objective is to have a recruiting year this coming year that’s equal to or better than the one we had this year.”

- Ryne Dennis is a sportswriter for the Red & Black