Mike White sees early returns from Georgia’s addition of Hayes brothers

This offseason, UGA coach Mike White was tasked with filling two empty vacancies on his staff after assistant coach Anthony Goins took a job at NC State and director of operations Ben Gonzalez left for a basketball operations coordinator position with the Utah Jazz.

In response to their departures, Georgia employed a pair of brothers with an immense amount of history with the program. Jarvis and Jonas Hayes were each hired back in April to assistant coaching positions to round out the coaching staff for the 2026-27 season.

Both Jarvis and Jonas come over from Georgia State, where Jonas served as head coach for the last four seasons, while Jarvis spent the last seven years as an assistant coach for the Panthers.

Before accepting their job at Georgia, White said in a press statement that he and the brothers have “never worked together,” but that did not stop him from understanding how much Jarvis and Jonas can bring to the team.

Each played at Western Carolina for their first year in 2000, before transferring to Georgia ahead of the 2001 season. Because of NCAA rules, each player had to sit out for the entirety of the ’01 season before taking the SEC by storm.

Jarvis, averaging over 18 points per game across his sophomore and junior campaigns, earned First Team All-SEC in both years — the first Bulldog to do that since Dominique Wilkins in 1981–82 — and reached 1,000 career points in just 55 games, six games quicker than UGA’s career scoring leader, Litterial Green.

Following the 2003 season, Jarvis was selected by the Washington Wizards with the No. 10 overall pick in the first round of the 2003 NBA Draft. Over his seven seasons played with three different teams, he scored 3,553 points in 427 games.

Jonas averaged 8.4 points and 5.1 rebounds as a sophomore and contributed 6.7 points and 4.4 boards as a junior. He then started 29 of 30 games played as a senior and averaged 11.9 points and 5.3 rebounds.

This is Jonas’ second stint with Georgia, following his work as the program’s operations coordinator during the 2012-13 season, before becoming an assistant coach, a position he held until 2018.

Now, as Georgia nears the end of its summer workouts with only a handful of practices remaining, White is pleased with the early returns the Hayes brothers have provided.

“They’re awesome. They’re twins, but they’re so very different. They’re really fun to be around,” White said on Tuesday. “First and foremost, they bring a lot of positive energy to our program, likability. Our guys love these guys. They have so much pride. In the state of Georgia, University of Georgia, the red and black, their time here, they really, really represent well.”

While the Hayes and White had not known each other before working together, all three had always had great admiration for each other. Now on the same staff, White said he has enjoyed the camaraderie the brothers bring through coaches’ tales, “their pitches to recruits and to parents and their experiences and what Georgia means to them.”

Both Jarvis and Jonas attended Atlanta’s Frederick Douglass High School, giving them even more of a recruiting advantage, especially when you stack that on top of already being legacy players.