Georgia State Panthers


The Georgia State Panthers are the intercollegiate athletics teams that represent Georgia State University, located in Atlanta, Georgia. All GSU teams compete at the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I FBS level as members of the Sun Belt Conference, a conference of which they were a charter member. Previously, GSU was a member of the CAA, and prior to that, the ASUN Conference.

History

Prior to conference affiliation

Georgia State became a fully accredited NCAA Division I athletics program in 1963, which saw the university give scholarships at the highest level of competition for college athletics. However, sports did exist at GSU prior to becoming an NCAA member; In 1956, the Panthers began a baseball team, the oldest sport played at Georgia State. Prior to joining the NCAA, no scholarships were given and no sports were part of any national affiliate. When GSU did join the NCAA, only basketball, cross country, golf, and tennis were played as NCAA sports . In 1975, five women's sports also joined, playing in the New South Women's Athletic Conference, or NSWAC, a conference of the AIAW.

Founding of the Sun Belt Conference

In 1976, the Sun Belt Conference was formed with Georgia State being one of its founding members. However, in 1980, the Panthers left the Sun Belt, with the most cited reason being that the conference encouraged its members to play in the largest basketball venue in town; in the case of the Panthers, that was the 16,500 seat Omni Coliseum, an NBA venue where the Atlanta Hawks played. With only a few hundred fans attending each game, this became a joke to media outlets, who purposefully tried to get pictures of the action with a lack of a crowd in the background. After leaving the Sun Belt, the Panthers played as independents for three years before joining the TAAC.

Addition of football

Once Georgia State entered the CAA, a recurring question of whether the university should add football was brought up, leading to the commissioning of a feasibility study in 2006. After gauging student and alumni interest, the administration found enough support to continue onwards with the effort, leading to the hire of former Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Reeves as a consultant. This culminated in the official launch of the football program on April 17, 2008. Due to GSU's membership as a part of the CAA, membership into the football division of the conference was sought after, leading to the Panthers being invited to become a football participant for the 2012 season. Due to the addition of men's scholarships, Title IX regulations required the university to have additional women's scholarships added, leading to the addition of beach volleyball.
With the addition of football, a rebrand of athletics took place, changing the logos, fight song, and mascot design. The university also decided to go back on one of its previous institutional name rules in making GSU a secondary name for the university.
In February 2012, the university announced that it had commissioned a study to find the feasibility of moving up to the Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of collegiate football, citing that the shifts in landscape due to conference realignment offered opportunities that should be carefully considered. The study was conducted by Collegiate Consulting, who concluded that the university was in a good position to move up to the FBS. On April 9, 2012, Georgia State officially accepted an invitation to rejoin the Sun Belt Conference on July 1, 2013.

Relocation to Downtown Atlanta

Although the athletic department was housed within the GSU Sports Arena, the limited space available in Downtown Atlanta forced different sports to be played in different areas around Metropolitan Atlanta. A complex in the Panthersville community housed a baseball field, soccer pitch, and softball field, as well as intramural fields, approximately 7 miles from the central campus and not regularly accessible by campus transportation. With the relocation of the Atlanta Braves from Turner Field in Downtown to SunTrust Park, an opportunity for the different Panther athletic programs to relocate to the central campus opened. Georgia State, along with Carter, a real estate company in Atlanta, would bid for the stadium and surrounding lands, eventually purchasing all 68-acres for $30 million. Between the 2016 and 2017 season, Turner Field would be converted to Center Parc Stadium, a football specific stadium with an initial capacity of 25,000. The stadium also hosts the athletics department, and will host the School of Hospitality. The purchase also included the surrounding parking lots, including the footprint of Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, which housed the Atlanta Braves when they first moved to Atlanta, and where Hank Aaron would break Babe Ruth's home run record. The university plans to erect a new baseball stadium in this footprint for the GSU baseball team to play at.

Conference membership

  • Sun Belt Conference
  • Independent
  • TAAC/Atlantic Sun
  • Colonial Athletic Association
  • Sun Belt Conference

    Sports sponsored

Men's basketball

  • First season: 1963
  • Conference Championships
  • *2000, 2001, 2002, 2014, 2015, 2019
  • Conference Tournament Championships
  • *1991, 2001, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2022
  • NCAA Tournament Appearances
  • *1991
  • *2001
  • *2015
  • *2018
  • *2019
  • *2022
  • NIT Appearances
  • *2002
  • *2014
  • CIT Appearances
  • *2012
  • *2017
  • Retired Jerseys
  • *3 Rodney Hamilton
  • *5 Thomas Terrell
  • *13 Kevin Morris

    Women's basketball

  • First season: 1975
  • Conference Championships
  • *2002, 2003
  • Conference Regular Season Champions
  • *2000, 2001, 2002, 2004
  • NCAA/AIAW Appearances
  • *1981
  • *2001
  • *2002
  • *2003
  • WNIT Appearances
  • *2000

    Baseball

  • First season: 1965
  • Conference Championships
  • *2009
  • NCAA Tournament Appearances
  • *2009
  • Retired Jerseys
  • *30 Mike Hurst

    Beach volleyball

  • First season: 2013
  • AVCC National Championship Appearances
  • *2015
  • NCAA National Championship Appearances
  • *2016

    Football

  • First Season: 2010
  • Move to FBS: 2013
  • Bowl Games
  • *2015 – Cure Bowl – San Jose State, L
  • *2017 – Cure Bowl – Western Kentucky, W
  • *2019 – Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl – Wyoming, L
  • *2020 – LendingTree Bowl – Western Kentucky, W
  • *2021- TaxAct Camellia Bowl- Ball State, '''W'''

    Golf

Men's golf

Records for men's golf are incomplete between 1968 and 1988
  • Conference Championships
  • *1998, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2014, 2017
  • NCAA Regionals
  • *1999, 13th place
  • *2000, 5th place
  • *2001, 18th place
  • *2003, 13th place
  • *2004, 7th place
  • *2005, 4th place
  • *2006, 11th place
  • *2007, 9th place
  • *2008, 17th place
  • *2009, 6th place
  • *2010, 26th place
  • *2014, 2nd place
  • NCAA Championship
  • *2000, unranked
  • *2004, 11th place
  • *2005, 13th place
  • *2007, unranked
  • *2008, 13th place
  • *2014, 23rd place

    Women's golf

  • Conference Championships
  • *2003, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010
  • NCAA Regionals
  • *2003, 18th place
  • *2005, 17th place
  • *2006, 11th place
  • *2008, 14th place
  • *2009, 9th place
  • *2010, 21st place
  • *2011, 87th place
  • *2012, unranked
  • NCAA Championship
  • *2006, 43rd place

    Soccer

Men's soccer

  • First Season: 1968
  • Conference Championships
  • *1983, 1986, 1987, 1997, 2000, 2018
  • NCAA Appearances
  • *1997, 2000, 2011, 2018

    Women's soccer

  • First Season: 1994
  • Conference Championships
  • *1997
  • NCAA Appearances
  • *1997

    Softball

  • First Season: 1985
  • Conference Championships
  • *1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 2011
  • NCAA Tournament Appearances
  • *1994, 2011
  • NISC Tournament Appearances
  • *2017

    Tennis

Men's tennis

Records for men's tennis are incomplete between 1984 and 1987
  • First Season: 1959
  • Conference Championships
  • *1989, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2013, 2017
  • NCAA Appearances
  • *1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2013, 2017
  • Individual NCAA Appearances
  • *2007, 2013

    Women's tennis

  • Sun Belt Conference Championships
  • *2014, 2016

    Rivalries

Georgia State has Sun Belt rivalries with all of the East Division schools. Georgia State's main Sun Belt rivals are Georgia Southern and South Alabama.

Georgia Southern

Although Georgia State has only played football since 2010, rivalries have been formed on the basketball court, most notably against Georgia Southern. Both schools participated in the Atlantic Sun Conference between 1983 and 1992. Since the rivalry began, the two teams have played each other 51 times, with Southern holding the series at 34–17. Since both schools can be abbreviated GSU, a point of conflict between the two schools is that both fan-bases claim that their university is, in fact, the real GSU. Georgia State lays claim to the initials as it became a university long before Georgia Southern did. Also, Georgia State's URL and official logo's both contain the acronym. Georgia Southern doesn't officially recognize GSU as an abbreviation for the school, actively discouraging it in its identification standards, and generally uses GS in its own branding.
The beginning of the football rivalry was initiated after the hire of former Appalachian State athletic director Charlie Cobb to the same position at GSU. During Georgia State's press release introducing Cobb, he revealed that Georgia Southern's athletic director Tom Kleinlein told him "welcome, now the war is on." The two teams met on the gridiron during the 2014 football season at Georgia Dome. During the run up to the game, fans from both teams expressed their dislike for the other over social media outlets such as Twitter, at times trending with tags of "SouthernNotState" and "StateNotSouthern" both of which were used as slogans for shirts given out by both universities. During the period before the game, fans dubbed the matchup as "Modern Day Hate," a play on the rivalry between Georgia Tech and UGA, Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate. The game would go on to draw the second largest crowd of any Georgia State game at 28,427, ending with Georgia Southern beating Georgia State by a final score of 69 to 31. In 2015, Georgia State beat Georgia Southern 34–7, the worst home defeat for Georgia Southern in school history. Currently, Georgia State holds a 3–1 lead in the football series.
In October 2015, it was announced that Georgia State and Georgia Southern would begin a rivalry series spanning all of the sports played between the two schools. Each match-up would be worth a point, except football, which would be worth two, and baseball and softball, to which points would be allocated based on the series winner. Any competition in which all competing teams are ranked, the team that ranks higher would earn that point. Bonus points are awarded if a contest occurs during the conference tournament, with an extra bonus point being awarded if the competition results in one of the schools winning an automatic bid a national tournament. The previous years trophy is awarded during a half-time presentation at the two schools football match-up. After its second year, Georgia State leads the series 2–0.