Kirby Smart shares unique aspect of Georgia's spring practice

Georgia head coach Kirby Smart introduced a new spring tradition three years ago called “skull sessions. The Bulldogs have won the previous two national championships since starting the skull sessions so they have obviously continued doing them.

Smart hopped on Basketball and Beyond with former Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski and discussed what the process involves.

“We’ve started a unique training process that we started the year we won the first national title and we call them skull sessions,” Smart said. “But we break out into diverse groups of about 12 groups. We incorporate everybody in the organization — our trainers, our strength staff, our player development staff. If you work anywhere on the staff, you’re going to be in one of those groups.”

Each of the sessions has four leaders of it that help direct the sessions.

This year’s topic of conversation is the New Zealand national rugby union team, better known internationally as the All Blacks. The All Blacks are known as one of the most successful sports organizations in history.

They have won three Rugby World Cups, finished second once, finished in third place three times and came in fourth once. But their success goes well beyond the Rugby World Cup.

“They’ve been awesome because you have upperclassmen, lowerclassmen, receivers, defensive backs, just spread across and we have a curriculum we go through,” Smart said. “This year, we decided to study the All Blacks, the rugby team that is the winningest organization in all sports. It’s really cool to study them. They have some mantras they go by. Better never rests. Nobody’s bigger than the team. Sweep the sheds. They’ve got a lot of sayings. We take one thing per week and we really dive into it. We make the players give explanations.”

Kirby Smart said spring skull sessions are good at bringing new players into the fold

One of the benefits of the spring skull sessions, Kirby Smart said, is that early enrollees and transfers get a chance to understand what the Georgia culture is all about.

“I think the biggest thing we’ve done in those is we incorporate those new guys, those 19 mid-years,” Smart said. “We kind of get them indoctrinated into what is our culture? What does it look like? The older players speak to it. We make the younger players speak up in there. We think it helps them get more comfortable being part of the team.”