The smile on Juwan Parker’s face told the story .

“After a year off, it’s always great to be back,” said Parker, who after missing all of last year with a torn Achilles, appears ready to once again play a key role with Mark Fox’s Bulldog basketball team.

“Juwan is healthy,” Fox said. “We’re just monitoring the amount of volume he puts on his legs each day and I think in May we had a one-hour limit. He came back in June and it’s been pretty much an hour and a half. Now in July, he’s gone two hours a few times but we’re just slowly trying to get to that point.”

According to Parker, he’s pretty close.

When Georgia travels to Spain next week for three games in three cities, Parker figures to get plenty of work to see just how strong the Achilles truly is.

“It will be great just to get the overall rust off,” he said. “I’ve been practicing the whole time every day, so as far as my endurance goes, the leg is fine, it’s just getting back into the rhythm.”

Fox plans on doing just that.

‘I think what we’ll do with Juwan is just let his body be his gauge,” Fox said. “Obviously, this is a trip where everybody will get a chance to play, everyone is going to get experience on the court. No one is going to get massive minutes, but if there’s a day where he’s sore we might rest him. We’ll see how he responds but I don’t anticipate that we’ll have to. He’s really doing well.”

Parker’s journey back has certainly been a long one.

After originally suffering the injury in January of 2015 against LSU, Parker would undergo surgery that summer, but only saw action in Georgia’s exhibition game against Armstrong State.

“Even during the game I could tell I couldn’t move like I wanted to or react like I wanted to,” Parker said. “I couldn’t give 100 percent and they didn’t want me to hurt myself or the team any more than I had to.”

But that was then.

“Last year this time, he returned to shooting some balls but developing the endurance in that tendon has really been the challenge because when it gets fatigued the pain come back. When it hurts he’s obviously not as mobile and things like that,” Fox said. “So just developing the endurance back in that tendon has been the big thing. He’ll probably be a little rusty when he gets out there, but that’s OK. That’s one of the reasons this trip is important to knock some of that off.”