The baseball team is No. 1 in the country right now. Men's tennis is also No. 1, and the two-time defending national champion. Women's tennis is No. 2. Softball is No. 11.
So yes, Georgia Gwinnett College does in fact do sports -- and while everyone in metro Atlanta might not know it yet, the competition certainly does.
"And we've still got a long way to go," athletic director Darin Wilson said this week. "We've only been around for a few years."
To be clear, Georgia Gwinnett College, whose Lawrenceville campus is now home to some 11,000 students, was founded in 2005. But its sports teams -- the four mentioned above plus men's and women's soccer -- have only been operating in an official intercollegiate capacity since the 2012-13 school year.
Nonetheless, the Grizzlies have taken the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (think high-level Division II competition, Wilson said) by storm. Especially this season.
The men's tennis team, fresh off NAIA titles in 2014 and 2015, is currently 14-0. The women's tennis team, which won a title in 2014, is 10-1. Softball is 33-13. The top-ranked baseball team is a mind-boggling 38-1 so far.
Wilson credits the school's adminstration and his coaches with the speedy success. And while the teams do have an undeniably local feel -- the baseball team, for instance, has six players with Gwinnett ties and 11 more from the greater metro Atlanta area -- they also draw internationally. The tennis squads have players from Israel, Argentina, Australia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
About once a week, Wilson said, he gets asked if more sports are in GGC's future. His answer is that he's content to continue building the current programs, but that he'd like to expand to 10 or so sports sometime in the next several years.
In the South, of course, that answer leads to another question -- football?
"We're on the 30-year plan," Wilson joked.
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