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The profile · researched 18 October 2026
Georgia rebuilt from zero: a 50-year programme hands the keys to Ayla Guzzardo
Georgia's Lady Bulldogs have five Final Fours and 37 NCAA tournament trips behind them, but almost nothing carried over from last season — nine players left, eleven arrived, and a first-year head coach opens at Stegeman Coliseum on 2 November 2026.
Athens, 1973, and the man who stayed 36 years
Women's basketball at the University of Georgia started in 1973-74 under Flossie M. Love, in the first wave of programmes that followed Title IX. The job became a full-time one in 1979, when Andy Landers took it, and he kept it until 2015 — 36 seasons, 862 wins against 299 losses, and a 273-144 record in conference play. Almost everything the programme is measured against now was built in that stretch.
Landers' Georgia reached the NCAA tournament 37 times, a total tied for second all-time among Division I programmes. The home floor has not moved: Stegeman Coliseum, capacity 10,523, on the south side of campus, shared with the men's team and with gymnastics.
The result is a programme with deep history and a thin recent record — a combination that explains both the patience Georgia has shown with rebuilds and the speed with which it moved in April 2026.
Five Final Fours, two finals, no title
Georgia went to the Final Four in 1983, 1985, 1995, 1996 and 1999, and twice got to the last game: 1985 and 1996. Both times it finished as national runner-up. That 1996 side was the high-water mark, built around Saudia Roundtree, who was named Naismith Player of the Year that season.
The names in the record book come from the same era. Janet Harris remains the career scoring leader at 2,641 points. Katrina McClain scored 796 in the 1987 season, still the single-season mark, and was SEC Player of the Year that year. Teresa Edwards, who went on to an Olympic career, came through the same programme.
The conference silverware is substantial without being recent: seven SEC regular-season championships and four SEC tournament titles. Nothing has been added to that list under any of the three coaches who followed Landers.
Three coaches in eleven years
Joni Taylor took over in 2015 and went 139-72 across seven seasons before leaving in 2022. Katie Abrahamson-Henderson followed and lasted four, finishing 69-59 with two NCAA tournament appearances and only one winning record in SEC play.
Her last season was comfortably her best. Georgia went 22-10 overall and 8-8 in the SEC in 2025-26, won the Island Division of the Fort Myers Tip-Off, started 14-0 before conference play, and finished ranked No. 24 in both the AP and coaches' polls. The signature night came on 15 February 2026, when Dani Carnegie scored 29 — 18 of them before half-time — and Georgia beat fifth-ranked Vanderbilt 76-74 at Stegeman. Mia Woolfolk added 19, including 11 in the fourth quarter, and Mikayla Blakes' 27 for Vanderbilt was not enough.
It did not hold. Kentucky knocked Georgia out of the SEC tournament 76-61, and on 21 March 2026 the seventh-seeded Bulldogs lost their NCAA first-round game to Virginia in overtime, 82-73. On 4 April the university and Abrahamson-Henderson announced they had mutually agreed to part ways.
The fastest hire in the SEC
Georgia filled the job in a day. Athletic director Josh Brooks announced Ayla Guzzardo on 5 April 2026, the fourth head coach in programme history, calling her a proven winner whose passion was unmatched. Guzzardo said Georgia was a special programme that had helped lay the foundation for the success of the sport.
Her case rested on one extraordinary season. Guzzardo spent 2025-26 at McNeese and took a team that had gone 10-21 to 29-6 — a school record for wins, a Southland regular-season title, and a loss to Stephen F. Austin in the conference tournament final. Before that she had eight seasons at Southeastern Louisiana, going 122-105, winning multiple regular-season championships and taking the Lady Lions to their first NCAA tournament in 2023. She is a three-time Southland Coach of the Year, in 2023, 2025 and 2026, and her overall head-coaching record stands at 151-111.
Guzzardo is from Hammond, Louisiana. She played at Shelton State Community College from 2006 to 2008 and at Akron from 2008 to 2010, as a point guard, and began coaching on the Akron staff in 2010. She has said she wants her teams to defend first and play with the same insistence on involving everyone that she did as a player. Two of the five players on last season's Southland All-Defensive Team were hers.
Eleven in, nine out
The roster Guzzardo inherited no longer exists. Nine players left after the coaching change, including Carnegie and Woolfolk, guard Trinity Turner to Baylor and Jocelyn Faison to Iowa; centre Aicha Ndour exhausted her eligibility. Not one member of the rotation that beat Vanderbilt is still in Athens.
In their place came eleven newcomers, ten of them transfers: Milan Brown from Wake Forest, an ACC All-Freshman Team pick; Jordana Codio from Seton Hall, a Big East All-Tournament selection; Dakota Howard, the Southland Freshman of the Year, who followed Guzzardo from McNeese along with Tyreona Sibley; Jailyn Banks from Belmont, Jordan Thomas from West Virginia, Faith Wylder from Mississippi State, Nya Smith from Purdue, Harmonie Ware from Arkansas and Blessing Adebanjo from Arizona. Guzzardo's staff is largely new too, including Kenneth Lee Jr. and Justin Payne.
Expectations have been set accordingly. SEC media picked Georgia 13th in the 2026-27 preseason poll, and no Georgia player was named to any preseason all-conference team.
What the season in front of them looks like
Georgia announced the 2026-27 schedule on 11 August 2026 and released tip times on 7 October: 15 home dates at Stegeman, plus a trip abroad. The opener is Monday 2 November against West Georgia at 5pm ET, the early half of a doubleheader with the men's team. Winthrop follows on 5 November, Nicholls State on 8 November, Kennesaw State on 11 November and Louisiana Tech on 22 November, before the Cancun Challenge from 26 to 28 November and the ACC-SEC Challenge on 2 December. Non-conference play closes against Georgia Southern on 28 December.
Conference play starts on New Year's Eve at home against Texas, then goes on the road to Alabama and Oklahoma, with back-to-back trips to LSU and Texas A&M later in the run. The regular season ends at Stegeman on 28 February against South Carolina. The SEC tournament is in Greenville, South Carolina, from 3 to 7 March 2027.
That slate is the real test of the April decision: a first-year SEC head coach, a squad assembled in a single off-season, and a schedule that includes the conference's strongest teams at both ends of it.
The show, now
A Georgia home game is a weeknight or weekend afternoon fixture at Stegeman Coliseum, played in the NCAA's four 10-minute quarters and usually done inside two hours including stoppages and the half-time interval. There are 15 home dates in 2026-27, tip times for which were published on 7 October 2026; the opener on 2 November against West Georgia is stacked as a doubleheader with the men's team, tipping at 5pm ET, which is as close as the format gets to a support act. The room is rarely full — the 10,523-seat arena drew 3,682 for the upset of fifth-ranked Vanderbilt on 15 February 2026 and 2,426 for 11th-ranked Oklahoma four days later — so the atmosphere depends heavily on the opponent, and the two biggest draws this season are Texas on New Year's Eve and South Carolina in the 28 February finale. What the team on the floor will look like is genuinely open: every significant contributor from last season has gone, and Guzzardo's pitch is defensive pressure and a guard-led, shared offence rather than the one-scorer model that produced Carnegie's twelve 20-point games. With the squad picked 13th in the SEC and no player on a preseason all-conference list, the early non-conference run through Winthrop, Nicholls State, Kennesaw State and Louisiana Tech in November is where the shape of the thing will first be visible.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · foxsports.com · dawgnation.com · georgiadogs.com · georgiadogs.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
The original uploader was Pruddle at English Wikipedia. · CC BY 2.5
Ianmccor · Public domain
The original uploader was Pruddle at English Wikipedia. · CC BY 2.5
