UGA’s Landers keeps turning out graduates

One class at a time, for six years.

Lady Hardmon Grooms wasn’t exactly on the college graduation fast track. At that pace, quitting might have been easier. But in August, with a period behind this summer’s internship, the former Georgia basketball player will put the brakes on her long pursuit.

And consider Kedra Holland-Corn, blazing through courses as if her future depended on it 12 years after shedding her UGA uniform for those of the WNBA and professional teams around the world.

Saturday, she’ll don a cap and gown.

Slow and steady, fast and furious, it doesn’t matter. Georgia coach Andy Landers’ 30-year streak is intact. Fifty-three of his 54 four-year-letterwinners will have graduated by August; the 54th, Danielle Taylor, will wrap up after a one-year internship ends next May.

“I thought very briefly about finishing up overseas or in another place,” Holland-Corn, 34, said. “But there was something about it. I didn’t want to get my degree from anywhere else. I wanted to say that I’m a Georgia grad; that I was one of the athletes who finished.”

Hardmon Grooms, who played at Georgia from 1988-1992, is a successful commercial real estate agent. She’s coaching high school basketball at Arlington Christian School in Fairburn. And she saved money while playing internationally and for the Sacramento Monarchs until 2005.

“College is supposed to help you get a job,” she said. “I’ve got a job.”

She wanted the sports management and recreation degree, instead, for her mother and 4-year-old daughter, Gabbie. And for “Boss,” as she refers to Landers.

“Boss would call me and say, ‘You want your little girl to see your degree. That degree is going to mean a lot to you.’ “

Or, as he put it: “Lady, get your rear end back over here.”

It was a persuasive argument.

Every year since 2003, she’s commuted for a class a year until the internship.

The Lady Bulldogs haven’t had a deep NCAA tournament run since advancing to the Elite Eight in 2004, but success in the classroom hasn’t slowed at all. The program ranks first in the SEC in graduation rates, according to the NCAA’s Academic Progress Report. With a minimum score of 925 out of 1,000 required, the Lady Bulldogs’ score is 986. It’s no accident, Landers said.

“We do things in front of our players and for our players that proves to them that we mean what we say when it comes to school,” he said.

That goes beyond punishment for slacking in the classroom. When Taylor’s academic demands as a sociology major conflicted harshly with her basketball schedule, she went to Landers.

“I didn’t know anything else I wanted to do,” she said about her major. “I didn’t have an interest in anything else academically. It was a big problem, so I went to Coach.”

He rescheduled practices.

“It meant everything to me,” Taylor said.

That is the kind of impression Holland-Corn remembers. A three-year starter who played from 1993-1997, she led the Lady Bulldogs to the 1995 Final Four, an NCAA runner-up finish and SEC Championship in 1996, and the SEC title in 1997. Few players experienced more success on the court. Drafted first to the ABL, she went on to play seven years in the WNBA and 10 seasons in Europe.

Still, those 27 semester hours left to earn a sociology degree stayed on her mind.

After retiring in 2007, she returned to campus in August to a new world.

“They are typing and looking at Facebook and text messages are going off,” she said. “It was a huge eye-opener. It makes you realize how old you actually are.”

She pressed on, this semester studying subjects including statistics and sociology theory.

“I was so eager to come back, I didn’t dread it one bit,” said Holland-Corn, who has been married since her junior year and is five-months pregnant with her first child.

Hardmon Grooms, also married, wasn’t as gung-ho. Even now, despite an internship at her summer camp at Arlington, she’s not thrilled with the paperwork. But her complaints go only so far.

“At the end of the day, I completed something I started years ago,” she said.