Greg McGarity pleased with direction Mark Fox's basketball program is headed

Even as Georgia struggled through a slump in February, athletics director Greg McGarity never lost faith in head coach Mark Fox and the basketball program.

While the slide included with a loss at Auburn on Feb. 24, which was a devastating blow for Georgia’s NCAA Tournament chances, McGarity said he continued to look at the big picture with where Fox has the basketball program headed.

Fox has been at Georgia for seven years and now seems to have a stable foundation, evidenced by three consecutive 20-win campaigns and four consecutive .500-or-better seasons in conference play. So while the Bulldogs struggled during a crucial stretch, McGarity remained upbeat about the direction of the program.

"You see certain spells there where things may not go your way because there’s just a lot going on," McGarity said. "They’re playing two games a week. There’s a lot of stress on these young people. We have to remember they’re 18-to-21-year-olds. They have other things going on in their life. They have classes, their personal life, things like that. There are a lot of things to juggle."

Georgia loses Kenny Gaines and Charles Mann to graduation but will return Yante Maten and J.J. Frazier. Maten, a power forward with NBA potential, elected to return for his junior season instead of giving the professional level a shot.

The duo will look to lead the program back to the NCAA Tournament a year from now. They finished this past season strong by winning six of its final eight games. Not that McGarity saw the strong finish coming but it helped reinforce the notion that everything is fine with Georgia basketball.

"I think that’s why you don’t really comment during the season because we’ve seen teams – look at Indiana, I think people were burying Tom Crean earlier," McGarity said. "And look what they did at the end of the year. They came on and played well."

But with how Georgia finished its season, the expectations will once again be as high – if not higher – than where they were to start the 2015-16 season.

Fox understands what’s at stake moving forward. With the groundwork stabilized, it’s time to make that next step to not only get back to the NCAA Tournament, but to advance too.

"Now that the foundation is in place we can swing for the next level," Fox said. "That’s going to take lots of work and we’re going to have to be motivated to work harder than we ever had before as coaches and players. But now the program is in position to where we can try and take that next step."

This story was originally published March 30, 2016 at 7:54 PM with the headline "Greg McGarity pleased with direction Mark Fox's basketball program is headed."