Category: UGA Football

ATHENS, Ga. — University of Georgia head football coach Kirby Smart previewed fall camp with media on Wednesday. He offered the following comments.

Opening Statement

“I will start with the release that was distributed yesterday about the improvements to Sanford Stadium. We’re certainly proud of those. We value fan experience. Josh Brooks and myself both do. All the details will be included, but we are looking forward to those improvements, and certainly needed in those areas of the stadium. So we’re excited about those. We’re opening camp today, and we don’t open practice, but we are practicing earlier tomorrow, which is not a seven-, eight-year tradition for us. We’ve traditionally practiced in the afternoon. We’ve got some guys still doing final exams, and it was going to cause us to miss a few guys, so we flipped the practice schedule around and going to go a little earlier at least tomorrow, then go back to our normal practice time in the afternoon moving forward from that. That probably prompted this meeting to happen today as opposed to tomorrow with us going earlier with the first practice. I’m excited to get the guys out there. They’ve had a great summer workout session. You usually measure summer success by where you are injury-wise in terms of soft tissue injuries, trying to avoid those, but you’re also trying to be in shape. The only way to get in shape is run and run in the heat. I’ve felt like up until maybe the July 4th break we had not had the heat exposure we had needed. We had not been outside and conditioning in the heat, and then as soon as I said that, it flipped really quick, and it got really hot, and from our July 4th break on, our guys have trained really hard in the heat, had a lot of acclimation. We don’t do, quote-unquote, testing anymore where you come in and have to run a test, but I feel really good about where our guys are from a conditioning level. The biggest focus for us in training camp is physical and mental toughness. That’s why we do training camp. We try to expose our guys to a lot of scheme. We try to expose our guys to getting to know each other, moving into one central location, and really just focusing on ourselves. I think the difference in the two teams from the last two years is they connected well in training camp. That will be a goal in this training camp, to see how well we connect and how well we compete. We’ve got a lot of jobs that are going to be up for grabs and up for competition, and I’m very eager to see our guys compete for those spots. With that, I’ll open it up.”

 
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