When Kirby Smart spoke with the beat media on Saturday afternoon, there was perhaps a bigger issue at hand—much bigger, you could say—than player injuries, or the scrimmage which had just taken place, Georgia’s first of the year. The Bulldogs’ head coach was asked about our nation’s “social justice issues,” which prompted professional teams this past week to refuse to play games—and what the Georgia coaching staff is doing to address any concerns of his team.

“Yes, our guys are heavily affected—and I don’t think you realize that,” Smart said. “I don’t think as coaches, sometimes our society, our donors, our alumni, our fans—I don’t think people in the country realize how it affects each young man differently.”

Smart credited his coaches for addressing such issues, particularly the black men on his staff: assistant coaches Dell McGee, Cortez Hankton, Charlton Warren, and Trey Scott, along with Jonas Jennings, the program’s director of player development.

“We lean on those guys; we lean on their experiences,” Smart said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job.”

Smart stressed that it’s not all about what is seen via television and social media, but, rather, listening to the personal experiences of his team and staff.

“It’s the personal experiences each one of them has had in their family or their community, and sometimes that resonates with them,” Smart said. “An experience a young man had with his mom, an experience a young man had with his brother—and when you sit there and you just listen, you realize how it affects each one differently.”

Smart said that one of the most important things he'd learned in the “process” was to “listen twice as much as you talk”—and, evidently, his staff has done a lot of listening. In addition, a number of Georgia players had been very adamant to take action against social injustice by first brainstorming and then coming up with ideas to literally take action.

“We’re big, I’m big, on action. That’s my big thing,” Smart said. “I’m not just going to sit there and issue a statement or words. We want action—and our guys came up with an action list of [17-18] items.”

Smart said he'd observed the social justice issues in Wisconsin earlier last week before the NBA boycotted playoff games on Wednesday. That’s when some players approached him, saying, “Coach, let’s talk, Let’s revisit this.” Up until that point, although the issues had been examined earlier in the summer, they essentially hadn’t been discussed “as a team.”

“Dell [McGee] and Cortez [Hankton] thought it would be a good time [to discuss such issues],” Smart said. “We let the players share things. What was supposed to be a quick meeting [on Thursday] and then go to our football stuff ended up being three-and-a-half hours of each guy sharing. It turned into brainstorming, coming up with some ideas. We didn't do any football that day. Football wasn't important.”

The players got to voice their opinions—and, emotionally, according to Smart, a lot of them “are in pain.” The head coach heard of that pain firsthand.

“It's easy to sit back behind a social media site and post something and have your opinion, but until you've actually heard guys and some of the pain they are going through, you don't know,” Smart said. “That certainly affected me, and it's affected our players.”

In turn, Smart emphasized the team has been very intentional about wanting to take action, and to do so while the University of Georgia’s athletic department represented it.

“They want to do things in the community. They want to give back to their communities. They want to make change,” Smart said. “They want to have 100 percent of the student-athletes at Georgia vote. They're challenging them (UGA’s student-athletes). They're issuing the challenges that need to be done. And, I'm really proud of them for that.”