ATHENS, Ga — Mookie DeMoss wants to head outside to the patio at the Boyd Golf Center for our interview. He needs to get warm, he said.

One thing the new Georgia men’s golf coach has learned in the past few months, since taking over for Chris Haack after two years as Haack’s assistant, is that his new office is much colder than his old one. That’s not all he’s learned, of course.

DeMoss was a captain on the Georgia team that made the Final Four at the 2015 NCAA Championships. He was an honorable mention All-American that season and finished 11th in the NCAA stroke play event. He knows this program well from his playing days, and he knows it even better after his years as the legendary Haack’s assistant.

When Haack brought DeMoss in as an assistant in January 2024, he did so knowing that DeMoss could be his successor. Haack, who retired this spring after 30 years as Georgia’s head coach, groomed him for the job.

“Coach Haack would bring me to a lot of meetings. From Day One, he was very much like, I want to teach you the job. I want you to learn every in and out and aspect of this,” DeMoss said. “He was so generous in saying, ‘Hey, I want you to see how this works; I want you to learn this.'”

DeMoss said the move from assistant coach to head coach has been smooth. There are a lot more phone calls and meetings, of course.

“It’s scheduling, it’s logistics, academics, compliance — it’s getting everything organized for the fall,” he said. “There is just a little bit of difference in responsibility level now, I would say.”

Over the summer, DeMoss hired Jimmy Beck as his assistant coach. Beck, a Georgia native who played collegiately at Kennesaw State, was an assistant coach at Ohio State before joining the Bulldogs. Georgia opens its season on Aug. 30 at the Visit Knoxville Collegiate in Knoxville, Tenn., and will play four other fall tournaments.

DeMoss takes over a team that features a strong group of returning players and the No. 1 recruiting class in the country. The Bulldogs had six current or former players competing at the U.S. Amateur Championship at Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pa., this week: recent graduate Carter Loflin, returning players Matt Moloney, JD Culbreth and Grayson Wood, and incoming freshmen Mason Howell and Hamilton Coleman. Loflin and Wood advanced out of the stroke play tournament and faced off against each other in the round of 64 match play draw, with Loflin prevailing. Loflin won two matches Thursday to advance to Friday’s quartefinals.

Moloney had a very good summer, advancing to the finals of the R&A Amateur Championship at Royal Liverpool in June, and finishing tied for fifth at The Open Championships’ Last-Chance Qualifier event at Royal Birkdale. Culbreth had a very strong freshman season in 2025-26, including setting the program record with a 10-under round at the Ka’anapali Classic in Hawaii last fall.

Howell won the U.S. Amateur in 2025, Coleman won the 2025 U.S. Junior Amateur, and incoming freshman Drew Woolworth is also a highly accomplished player who finished eighth at the 2025 PGA Junior Championship and won three Oregon Class 6A individual state championships in high school.

With such a standout freshman class coming in and an excellent group of Bulldogs returning, it would have been understandable if Haack had wanted to stick around for another year to see what this year’s Georgia team could achieve. But he wanted to leave with the cupboard full for DeMoss.

“I contemplated that and thought about that,” Haack said back in February, when the announcement was made that he was retiring and DeMoss was taking over the program, “but one of the driving themes that I’ve always had in my coaching career was leave it better than you found it. And so I know that I will be leaving it in really good hands with Mookie, and with a roster full of studs.”

DeMoss was at Merion this week to watch the Bulldogs in action, and soon he will have everyone in town to begin preparations for the upcoming fall tournaments. He’s looking forward to getting started.

“The excitement levels are high. It’s going to be nine guys that can all play and all can compete, and they’re, I think, a little nervous in a good way. There are a lot of good players on this team, so I think it’s going to be great,” he said. “Coach Haack was always big on (competing), and when I was here, that was the thing that pushed me, being around so many great players and having to compete day in and day out. It’s a group that wants to push each other very much.

“It’s that iron sharpens iron mentality, and that’s when it gets really fun.”

The post DeMoss Fired Up For First Season In Charge appeared first on FORE Georgia.

FORE Georgia

Message History

Delivery option(s)