Bike build photos, the latest polls, and a preview of tonight’s game. Scroll down to see it all!

Last week (December 10, to be precise), the Fastbreak Club and our Lady Bulldogs joined forces…and toolboxes…to assemble bikes that will brighten the holidays for some Athens-area kids whose families could use a little help. The annual Fastbreak Club Holiday Gathering/Bike Build is the Club’s newest tradition…and it’s quickly taken its place among the membership’s favorite events of the year. Your humble Fastbreak Club website dude was there…camera in hand…and we’ve got five galleries of festive photos posted for your enjoyment. Make sure you scroll down the page far enough to see them all. And…as always…if you’re a Fastbreaker working on a player scrapbook and there’s a photo here of your player that you’d like to use in your book, you are absolutely more than welcome to grab it. Just click on the picture and you’ll see a slightly larger sized version of it. Right-click your mouse on the larger picture to save it to your hard drive. If for whatever reason, you can’t get your picture to save, just drop me a line here at m.holcomb@windstream.net and I’ll be happy to e-mail you a .JPEG file of any photos you need. Enjoy!

Did you catch that Baylor/UConn game last night? Like we’ve been saying here all along…it’s looking more and more like “Baylor…and then everybody else” this season. While Connecticut picked up a couple of stray first-place votes in the ESPN/USA Today poll this past week, Baylor’s nationally televised win over the Huskies should make the Bears a unanimous number-one when the polls are updated in a couple of days. Our Lady Bulldogs did manage to move up a spot in both polls despite being idle for the week. Hey…we’ll take it.

Here’s a look at the top five in both national polls and Georgia’s ranking:

AP

1. Baylor

2. Connecticut

3. Notre Dame

4. Stanford

5. Maryland

13. GEORGIA

ESPN/USA TODAY

1. Baylor

2. Connecticut

3. Notre Dame

4. Stanford

5. Maryland

12. GEORGIA

Click here to see the entire top-25 in both major polls.

Who here is ready to get back after it following a two-week break? After putting basketball on the back burner for a fortnight in favor of studying, final exams, going to the movies, Christmas shopping, and whatever else…the Lady Bulldogs take back to the hardwood tonight as they return to Sin City for a Las Vegas Holiday Hoops Classic showdown with 25th-ranked Gonzaga. The Bulldogs of Gonzaga currently sport an 8-2 record, losing only to perennial Pac-12 powerhouses USC and Stanford. Our own Lady Bulldogs are currently 8-1 on the heels of a blowout win over Mercer down in Macon a couple of weeks ago. Interestingly, the Las Vegas Holiday Hoops Classic isn’t quite a tournament. It’s more like an invitation-only basketball festival staged at a neutral site (in contrast to your traditional holiday tournaments, which are usually hosted by a hometown participant). Dayton, Illinois, and Montana State make up the rest of the Classic field and Georgia, no matter the outcome of tonight’s game, will face Montana State tomorrow night in Vegas before flying home for Thursday night’s Appalachian State game at the Coliseum. Playing a couple of good teams on back-to-back nights is never easy…but it’s good preparation for the day-to-day grind of SEC and NCAA Tournament action in March.

The first-ever women’s basketball meeting between Georgia and Gonzaga is set for a 6:30 PM (Eastern) tip-off at South Point Arena in Las Vegas. No TV for tonight’s game…but you can always listen on your local Georgia Bulldog Radio Network affiliate station. We’ll have a game recap and a preview for tomorrow night’s Montana State game posted right here sometime late tonight.

Click here for the official Georgia/Gonzaga game notes.

Here’s a link to the Gonzaga women’s basketball page.

Click here to see the complete (other) Bulldog roster.

Blowout. An easy win for the Lady Bulldogs tonight down in Macon. Between the already poor radio reception out here in Winterville and the overcast skies tonight, my impressions of the game are spotty at best. So let’s once again turn things over to the official game recap, courtesy of Georgiadogs.com:

Jasmine Hassell scored a game-high 16 points to lead No. 14 Georgia (8-1) to an 80-43 victory over Mercer (2-7) on Tuesday night.

Khaalidah Miller added 15 points, 11 in the first half, and Anne Marie Armstrong chipped in 12. Jasmine James notched team-high tallies with eight rebounds, four assists and four steals.

Mercer grabbed an early lead and maintained an advantage for much of the half until a Meredith Mitchell lay-up put Georgia up 15-14 with 9:11 left in the half. That bucket helped ignite a 17-2 Lady Bulldog surge covering 5:13 that put Georgia up 29-16 at the 4:21 mark.

“Early on, we were switching our man-to-man defense, which is something we traditionally don’t go,” head coach Andy Landers said. “After six or seven minutes, we went back to the way we usually play and that seemed to get us on track on defense. Offensively, I thought we really did a nice job of running the floor but we’d get eight feet from the basket and they would road block us or we wouldn’t convert.”

The Lady Bulldogs’ first-half lead topped out at 16 points with 24 seconds left in the period, and Georgia continued to build on that after intermission. A 13-7 surge over the first 4:09 of the second half expanded the lead to 20.

Georgia committed a season-low nine turnovers and outscored the Bears 52-6 in the paint.

Ebony Jones saw her first action of the season, checking in with 2:16 left in the first half. Jones missed Georgia’s first eight games while recovering from a posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) injury in her lefft knee.

The Lady Bulldogs will now enjoy a 13-day break from competition while Final exams are administered on the UGA campus. Georgia will return to action on December 19 when the Lady Bulldogs face Gonzaga, an “Elite Eight” team last season, in the opening round of the Las Vegas Holiday Hoops Classic. Georgia also will take on Montana State in Vegas on December 20 before closing out the pre-holiday portion of its slate against Appalachian State in Athens on December 22.

You just read the official recap…but click here for the stats and box score.

This week we welcome first-timers Maryland (AP) and Duke (ESPN/USA Today) to the top five party in the latest episode of “As The Polls Turn.” During tonight’s broadcast of Connecticut’s utter dismantling of Texas A&M, one of the network talking heads picked Baylor to run the table and end the regular season undefeated. Well, the Bears got 68 out of a possible 70 combined first-place votes in both polls this week. Undefeated UConn remains a strong consensus number-two. After that? It’s wide open from week to week. As for our Lady Bulldogs, a little more love from the coaches than the writers as they moved up two spots in the ESPN/USA Today poll and only one position in the AP rankings.

Here’s a look at the top five in both national polls and Georgia’s ranking:

AP

1. Baylor

2. Connecticut

3. Notre Dame

4. Stanford

5. Maryland

14. GEORGIA

ESPN/USA TODAY

1. Baylor

2. Connecticut

3. Notre Dame

4. Stanford

5. Duke

12. GEORGIA

Click here to see the entire top-25 in both major polls.