NBA draft tomorrow night

Trey Thompkins and Travis Leslie hope to get phone calls Thursday night to find out where they will playing basketball in the future. Of course both passed up the chance to play one more year in Athens. Both are projected to be late first or early 2nd round picks. Most know that 1st round picks are where it is at when it comes to the NBA because those guys are guaranteed a multi year and multi million dollar contract. If you slip to the second round, your chances of making the NBA roster drop a good bit, you might be headed to the NBA-D league to improve your game. I hope that both make the first round, I think UGA hoops needs a shot in the arm, with several top recruits lately for the loaded class of 2012 pledging to other schools. Mark Fox needs to be able to say, yep, I coached those two guys, I helped develop them into NBA players, along with the kids he had at Nevada.

Below is a copy/paste from the Bulldog blog in the AJC-

Georgia’s strength and conditioning program was in the news again on Tuesday when it was announced that former Bulldog Tony Gilbert was hired as assistant director. Gilbert became the sixth football letterman to join the strength staff in some capacity since the end of last season. He joins director Joe Tereshinki Jr. (1974-76), full-time assistants John Kasay Sr. (1965-66) and Thomas Brown (2004-07), and Kendrell Bell (1999-2000) and Verron Haynes (2000-01) , NFL veterans who are helping out while they’re taking classes at UGA. (Keith Gray and Rex Bradberry, assistants under former director Dave Van Halanger, also remain on the staff.)

I think bringing back former players is a great thing but, are these former players qualified to be weight training coaches? One thing you can say is that they love UGA and they are motivated to help our young pups get ready to get this program back to the top. They played during the early years of the Richt era when our guys worked hard and EXPECTED to win so I like that aspect of Gilbert and company being back. But, I just hope they are qualified to do the best possible job getting our guys stronger and in better condition. I think our closs losses in the 4th quarter last year could certainly be the result of our S&C program. Here is an article from the Athens paper about Gilbert.

http://dogbytesonline.com/gilbert-back-as-strength-assistant-46522/

Finally another good article about Jonathan Taylor, of course the injured UGA baseball player that was recently selected in the MLB draft. As I have said before, this kid is truly an inspiration and I also think the fact that Texas took a 33rd round pick and used it on him, speaks volumes for that organization and the type of kid JT truly is.

http://dogbytesonline.com/georgia-outfielder-determined-to-play-baseball-again-46479/