Category: UGA Football

By John Frierson
Staff Writer

Josh Brooks is still hard at work in his job as Georgia’s Senior Deputy Athletic Director. While he’s working from home these days he’s also wearing a different hat, a chef’s hat. Brooks is savoring the chance to do as much cooking as possible for his family, making the most of this strange and unfortunate circumstance that has him and so many of us home all day long.

Brooks made a little time for a Quick Chat on Monday and talked about working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, his sports background, cooking, drawing and much more. Here’s some of what he had to say:

Frierson: What is it like having to do your job from home now?

Brooks: Luckily for me, my wife is a schoolteacher so she’s not able to go into work and she’s able to spend the majority of her time with our kids and handle the home-schooling for our family. I am participating as the lunch lady and custodian of the Brooks Home School Academy.

I’m able to close the door and make our bedroom the makeshift office, and still be active with the emails and calls and everything. I’m a very regimented-type person so I’ve tried to keep that normalcy to my day: I’m waking up at the same time and trying to exercise in the morning, eat breakfast and then be working at the same time I normally would be.

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Q. Coach Smart, anything you want to say to begin?
KIRBY SMART: The number one thing is the well being of our players, their families, our student-athletes, our students here at the University of Georgia. We’re trying every way we can to make sure they have everything they need because so many of them have parents in harm’s way, they’re in harm’s way taking care of themselves if they don’t respect what they’re being told.

And then a lot of them, they’re concerned about their being in shape, their ability to grow and get better, and that’s not the primary concern right now. The primary concern right now is the health and well-being of all our communities, and that’s really important that we drive that home, that this conference is really — although it should give you information, but it’s also to make sure that you understand that our priorities are in order and we think it’s really important that our players stay safe and healthy, and I think Ron [Courson] and his staff have done a great job of sending out information in regards to that. With that, I’ll turn it over to you so we can do some questions.

Q. How is your organization functioning over the last few weeks? Who’s in the office, who’s mostly at home, and does the coaching staff have daily Zoom meetings?
KIRBY SMART: Yeah, so that’s really like a three-part deal. The way we’re functioning the past few weeks, first of all, it starts back to spring break because we were on spring break, and that’s probably been one of the toughest transitions for us as you can imagine. A lot of schools were in session when this happened, and they were able to have a team meeting, they were able to have a little exit strategy. We were all over the place, and so everybody was out and we couldn’t really feel comfortable about bringing everybody back in together because we couldn’t come back to Athens.

So it’s been hard because we’ve had to call each player individually. We have ways to connect with them obviously through Zoom and FaceTime, but not having that exit meeting to say, okay, this is where we’re headed from this point, that was probably the toughest thing. So the weeks have been different.

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