Springtime in Athens can be almost as good as the fall, and it’s that much more enjoyable when the Dawgs are playing well. An afternoon basking in the sun at the Magill Tennis Complex, the Jack, or Foley Field should be high on everyone’s to-do list.

This year has been especially exciting with both the baseball and softball teams playing at a high level. Georgia is one of three schools (Florida, FSU) to earn top 8 national seeds in both sports. The softball team has already hosted a regional and super regional and used the homefield advantage to advance to the Women’s College World Series. Now the Diamond Dawgs have the opportunity to host all the way to Omaha.

It’s been a long time coming for Georgia baseball. The even-odd successes and struggles of the 2000s were frustrating at times, but at least there were four CWS trips to enjoy. The program hadn’t returned to the postseason since 2011 and hadn’t hosted a regional since the national runner-up season in 2008. Coach Scott Stricklin entered his fifth season without a postseason trip, and there was a good bit of pressure on Stricklin and the team to have a breakthrough season.

It’s safe to say that the breakthrough season came. The Diamond Dawgs had the second-best record in the SEC and finished 37-19 against one of the toughest schedules in the nation. They’ve swept Clemson and Georgia Tech and have impressive series wins over Arkansas and Texas A&M.

Georgia turned things around largely with pitching. The program has its “lowest team ERA in 50 years.” There’s been solid weekend pitching, the emergence of Aaron Schunk as a closer, and the development of freshmen Ryan Webb and C.J. Smith. Kevin Smith lost his starting role midseason but has rebounded with a string of strong outings highlighted by a win at Florida.

Certainly there’s been some improvement on offense too. Senior Keegan McGovern leads the team in both average and power with significant year-over-year improvements in both areas. His 15 HR have him among the SEC’s top five sluggers, but his team-best .325 batting average doesn’t crack the SEC’s top 15. Beyond McGovern there aren’t many batters setting the league on fire. Instead there have been occasional and timely contributions up and down the lineup. When combined with solid pitching, it’s been enough offense to get the job done.

The baseball team has already achieved its primary goal of reaching the postseason, but now they’re within reach of the program’s seventh trip to Omaha. Hopefully they can enjoy the same success on their home field that their softball counterparts enjoyed a little ways down Milledge.

Softball has had more recent success, reaching the WCWS by upsetting Florida in Gainesville in the 2016 super regional. But the softball Dawgs hadn’t hosted a super regional since 2014, and they hadn’t celebrated a super regional win on their home field since 2010. They dropped to the bottom of a brutal SEC only a year ago, but they’ve bounced back in spectacular fashion.

It’s been a remarkable season for the softball team. They started out on fire, losing only to current #1 Oregon. The loss of ace pitcher Brittany Gray in April (with her ridiculous 0.48 ERA) was a blow, but the team managed to hang on in the top 10. It wasn’t until the final weekend of the season that the team dropped an SEC series. Georgia dropped 4 of 5 games heading into the NCAA tournament, and that slump raised questions about Georgia’s vulnerability and status as a top 8 national seed. An ESPN analyst even picked Georgia as a team likely to be upset in the regional round.

Georgia picked a great time to bounce back. They’ve looked anything but vulnerable in the NCAA tournament, sweeping through both the regional and super regional rounds with five straight wins. Unlike the baseball team, Georgia softball earned its national seed with offense. They lead the SEC in most offensive categories, and they have five of the SEC’s top ten players in batting average. The top third of the order features the blistering speed of Cortni Emanuel, the power of Alyssa DiCarlo, and the versatility of Justice Milz. With such strong team stats, there’s been plenty of production throughout the rest of the lineup.

Replacing the dominant Gray in the pitching circle hasn’t been easy, and Georgia’s turned to a committee approach. Mary Wilson Avant has seen much of the work with Kylie Bass getting her share of starts. It wouldn’t be unheard of for Amanda Ablan to get a start in a pinch. The team’s biggest weakness has been fielding, especially in the infield. Some key mistakes have led to big innings. Pitching has had its shaky moments as well, and that’s to be expected when the ace is sidelined. Coach Lu Harris-Champer hasn’t hesitated to make a change. When Bass and Avant are on, as they were in the super regional against Tennessee, the team has the firepower to advance far in Oklahoma City.

If fans suited up, Tom Crean would have a pretty formidable squad next season. Georgia’s new basketball coach has been relentless in introducing himself to a Georgia fan base preoccupied with spring football and seemingly everything else but a sport that’s over six months away. He’s reached out to students, fired up the massive G-Day crowd, and taken advantage of nearly every opportunity to spread his enthusiasm for the future of Georgia basketball. It’s been impressive to watch him work, and I think he’s been fairly successful.

As every Georgia coach has discovered, recruiting players to Athens can be as difficult – perhaps moreso – than getting Georgia fans to think basketball in April and May. The elite signings have been few and far between (Jumaine Jones, Trey Thompkins, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope), and coaches more often have had to rely on sleeper prospects who overachieved: Gaines, Hayes, Maten, and Frazier. Sometimes it’s worked, but we know that it hasn’t been a consistent winning formula to get the team into the NCAA Tournament or to keep coaches around for very long.

Crean, like Mark Fox and the rest of his predecessors, will sink or swim based on his ability to bring in players. First things first: we’ll worry about things like player development and in-game strategy when the basic raw materials are in place. That hasn’t happened often at Georgia. If you go by the composite class rankings on 24/7, Fox never had a class rated higher than 6th in the SEC. Over half were 9th or worse. (Think football recruiting rankings are unpredictable? Fox’s highest-rated recruiting class in 2016 contained Crump, Harris, and Diatta. His lowest-rated class, the 2014 group that was rated dead-last in the SEC, featured a guy named Maten.)

That’s not really a knock on Fox – it’s not as if Georgia recruiting fell off a cliff. It was never strong to begin with. Fox, like those before him, just wasn’t able to overcome that legacy. Can Crean?

Turning around Georgia’s recruiting fortunes starts with the head coach, and Crean has both the energy and track record to at least have a shot. He has high name recognition and can point to some high-profile protégés in the NBA. Crean has pulled recruits from the Atlanta area before, but, as with Fox, Georgia is not exactly his home turf. For real local impact, coaches rely on their staff. Fox brought in Yasir Rosemond and later Jonas Hayes for that impact. Hayes in particular began to show some results, and Georgia finally landed a series of blue-chip commitments – just in time to change coaches.

Crean’s assembled an impressive staff with local recruiting in mind. Chad Dollar is an Atlanta native with a family legacy in Atlanta basketball. He’s coached in the SEC and at Tech. Amir Abdur-Rahim is cut from the same cloth: an Atlanta native with SEC (and, yes, Tech) experience. Enticing Abdur-Rahim to leave Texas A&M was considered a nice little coup, and he became the program’s highest-paid assistant in the process. Crean augmented those hires with Joe Scott who has Division I head coaching experience and is considered a solid tactician.

It’s going to take a while to gain some traction now that the staff is in place. Two blue-chip local prospects who considered Georgia, E.J. Montgomery and Ashton Hagans (a former Georgia/Fox commitment), are headed to Kentucky. Crean did notch his first recruiting win – combo guard Tye Fagan chose Georgia in the spring signing period over Ole Miss and others. Fagan will be looked to right away to bolster an offense that Crean expects to be more aggressive from outside.

Fagan aside, the new staff’s recruiting efforts will largely turn to 2019 and beyond. There’s a lot of ground to make up as relationships with prospects, schools, and communities can take years to develop. Crean’s name recognition and the familiarity of Abdur-Rahim and Dollar should help to speed that process along. His message will be a common one for programs without much recent success: come start something. “There’s plenty of room for statues,” as Crean put it. That challenge doesn’t always resonate, but when it does, the results can transform a program.

Good piece from Bill King on Georgia’s kicker Rodrigo Blankenship. King reminds us that while Blankenship has his oddities, he’s developed into a damn fine kicker whose 2017 season deserves to be mentioned among Georgia’s best placekicking performances. He made pressure-packed game-winning kicks against Notre Dame and Oklahoma, and his 51-yarder in overtime against Alabama would have been, with apologies to Butler and Munson, the most significant kick in Georgia history had the Dawgs held on.

It’s not too long ago that Blankenship was the goofy guy with glasses and the meddlesome father. Blankenship was after a scholarship, but we forget that he was fighting for the starting role right up to the start of the 2017 season. The scholarship came soon after.

The transformation of Blankenship from a walk-on with a tenuous hold on the starting job to a clutch weapon who coolly nailed field goals from 50+ yards in each playoff game is easy to overlook when we had so many good things going on. The barrage of touchbacks throughout the season was a welcome bonus. Blankenship’s quirks might have made him stand out at first, but his steady production is ensuring that he’ll be remembered for a long time for his kicking.