Fox working to get Bulldogs basketball team turned around

ATHENS — The job was a daunting one, and at best, Mark Fox got a late start.

Georgia’s head basketball coach has had a furious first two months at the helm of a team that had reached rock bottom during the 2008-09 season. Fox’s job was simple — rebuild a decimated program from the ground up in as short a time frame as possible, all while a dubious fan base judges each move with a critical eye.

Step one in the process, Fox said, was realizing the problems couldn’t all be fixed overnight.

“You do as much as you can in one day, and then you realize that the next day there’s going to be another long one waiting for you,” Fox said.

After two months away from his family, working from an office that, while now decorated with his own memorabilia from nearly two decades as a college coach, doesn’t exactly feel like home, Fox actually has accomplished quite a bit.

The job is nowhere near complete, but the foundation — fixing those problems so in need of addressing that they couldn’t be ignored — has come a long way in a short time.

First, there was a roster that was far lighter on talent than anything Fox had during his tenure at Nevada. Two players had graduated, two more had transferred, and one of the team’s two incoming recruits had been granted a release from his national letter-of-intent. The bottom line was Fox needed players — not just to win a few games next season, but simply to get through practice.

The first order of business was finding a point guard. Rising sophomore Dustin Ware was the only scholarship point guard on the roster, and despite the vast improvement he made during his freshman campaign, Fox knew Ware couldn’t go it alone.

“You need three point guards ideally on your roster so you can scrimmage, practice and give a guy a break now and then,” Fox said. “Like everybody else, when I first started we saw there was only one on the roster — and Dustin has perhaps the best approach of any player I’ve seen — but we needed to get him some help.”

Fox was hired at Georgia late in the game to nab many top recruits, but he landed point guard Vincent Williams out of Florida after just a month on the job, and two weeks ago, Gerald Robinson Jr., Tennessee State’s top scorer a year ago, announced his intention to transfer to Georgia. While Robinson will have to sit out a year, his presence alone gives the Bulldogs enough warm bodies to work with during practice that Ware will get a breather from time to time.

Of course, in terms of pure talent, Georgia’s best returning player was forward Trey Thompkins. The problem, however, was that Thompkins wasn’t sure he wanted to be back. After head coach Dennis Felton was fired at midseason, Thompkins said he would take a wait-and-see approach to the new coach, and for nearly two full months after Fox came on board, Thompkins remained quiet on his future plans.

Finally, the tension came to an end last month, and it really didn’t take much prodding from Fox. In the end, Thompkins simply liked what he saw in the new coach and decided to stay.

“I wasn’t really overly concerned he was going to leave,” Fox said. “But certainly he had to get comfortable with me before he said he was going to say.”

Even then, there was still some concern about the academic side of things for Georgia’s players. Fox admitted a bit of concern regarding players’ grades, particularly after Travis Leslie was forced to sit out the final two weeks of last season so he could concentrate on his classes.

It’s hard to say if Fox’s arrival was the turning point, but as it turned out, the players had a banner finish to the semester. And Fox sees no reason to think he won’t have his full complement of Bulldogs when the 2009-10 season tips off in the fall.

“We had a nice finish to the semester,” Fox said. “Most of our team will be in town for summer school, most of them do not need summer hours, but everyone did what they needed to do during the spring semester.”

The roster was just the first step in building the team for next season. There was also the job of filling out his staff.

Upon arrival, Fox brought Nevada assistant Kwanza Johnson with him. Johnson knew Fox well and would serve as a valuable conduit between the new coach and the old players.

As for the rest of the staff, Fox had a vision of what he was looking for. He needed coaches with good in-game skills, a wealth of experience and most importantly, strong ties to the Southern recruiting base. He landed his top two choices — former Alabama assistant coach Philip Pearson and former Virginia Tech assistant Stacey Palmore.

“We had a specific plan in place to end up with a staff like this, and I took my time with it because I wanted to get what I wanted,” Fox said. “Now we have the pieces in place that I’m very happy with.”

Fox’s most recent challenge has been filling out his team’s schedule. Road trips to Virginia Tech and Missouri were already on the slate to complete home-and-home agreements that began last season. A neutral site game against Illinois in Gwinnett, the usual in-state rivalry game against Georgia Tech and a date with St. John’s in New York as part of an SEC-Big East series were also already done deals. But finding other non-conference foes willing to travel to Athens without the promise of a return visit by the Bulldogs was proving to be a tough sell.

But Fox has even made strong progress on that front. New Orleans is set to open the season in Athens against Georgia — although the final contract for that game has yet to be signed — and several other deals are close to completion.

“We have made some progress, and we have come to terms on a couple games but the contracts are not back yet,” Fox said. “We have made some progress, but we’re not done by any means. But we’ve made a significant dent in it.”

It has been a long process, but so far, it has been a successful one. And while the steps forward haven’t always been huge leaps toward the top echelon in the SEC, they have been steady steps back to respectability, according to athletics director Damon Evans.

“He’s been strategic in everything that he’s done, and that’s important,” Evans said. “That’s a positive sign. It tells a little bit about how he approaches things, how he approaches the game and the business of being the head of Georgia men’s basketball.”

For Fox, it’s not about turning Georgia into a Final Four contender overnight. That was never the sales pitch he made to Evans or to the Bulldogs’ fans.

It’s a long road to Fox’s final destination, but after a frenzied start to his career in Athens, he thinks he finally has the program pointed in the right direction.

“What I feel now is that we have some things in place where we can start to move forward,” Fox said. “It’s like we put the train back on the track and now we can start to go forward.”