The Georgia’s women’s basketball team’s season-long rebounding woes came back to bite them once again in its loss to Florida on Sunday.

Having kept pace on the boards with both South Carolina and Vanderbilt, the Lady Dogs were out-rebounded 42-32 by the Gators.

In Southeastern Conference play, Georgia ranks eighth in rebounding margin, getting out-rebounded by 1.6 boards per game.

ANDY LANDERS

The Lady Dogs’ inability to effectively rebound at this time of the season is something that frustrates Georgia head coach Andy Landers.

“It’s no secret [that] it’s what we have to work on,” Landers said. “It’s what’s keeping us from being as good as we can be. It’s as simple as that.”

Landers went into the game against Florida knowing the Gators were one of the conference’s best rebounding teams.

The emphasis he put on the Gators’ superb rebounding has only increased his exasperation.

“When you go into a game against a team that you know is a very good rebounding team and you’ve stressed it for days and minutes before tip off and then you go out and don’t rebound the basketball, it’s troubling,” Landers said.

The inability to rebound the basketball has hindered the good work the Lady Dogs’ do in every other phase of their game.

They have the fourth-best offense and fourth-best defense in the conference, but have failed to separate themselves from other teams because of their inability to crash the boards.

“When you’re in close games it ends up being a game of possessions,” Landers said. “You look at the stats sheet of the Florida game, we outshot them from the floor, we outshot them from the free throw line, we had less turnovers. Look at all your stats [and] it boils down to one thing — they had 10 more rebounds than we did. They had eight more offensive rebounds than we did.”

Georgia’s leading rebounder is junior Anne Marie Armstrong with 6.2 per game.

The Lady Dogs’ post players are juniors Jasmine Hassell and Tamika Willis, who average 5.9 and 3.2 rebounds per game, respectively.

Landers said earlier in the season that the long shadow of Porsha Phillips — the Lady Dogs’ leading rebounder from last season — is still cast over the team whenever they go for a rebound.

The head coach stated again on Tuesday how much this year’s team has struggled to get over that loss, even entering the last month of the season.

“This group of players got spoiled last year,” Landers said. “We go down to Florida last year [and] Porsha Phillips gets 17 rebounds. We don’t have a 10-rebound-a-game player. We could have, but we don’t.”