You know you’re entering Decatur County in southwest-iest Georgia when the sign on U.S. 27 welcomes you to the home of Maggie Bridges, 2014 Miss Georgia.
Unmarked — for the time being — is the fact that this highway less traveled also happens to pass through the place that raised Kirby Paul Smart, the next in line of coaches tasked with guiding Georgia football to glory.
Allegiances are parceled out in many shares in this part of the world, what with Florida State being just a 45-minute drive away and the state of Alabama being almost close enough to hit with a rolled-up copy of the bi-weekly Post-Searchlight.
For the Bulldogs among them, they used to have a chapter of the Georgia fan club here. But that kind of fizzled out years ago. In one of the minor ironies of this coaching change, the small Georgia town in which the new guy earned his football chops has no resident booster club to celebrate him and his team.
Unofficial boosters, however, are in no short supply.
Every voice of the Bulldogs fan base has been raised in hope that Smart, the defensive assistant steeped in the ways of Nick Saban’s Alabama and the former blood, guts and brains of the mid-1990s-era Georgia secondary, will return the school to a championship peak it has not scaled in better than 35 years. But where better to first sample the supplications of the long-denied Bulldog than here, where Smart was introduced to the primitive art of football?
From the district attorney for five South Georgia counties, including Decatur, who has the relic of a Mark Richt-signed Georgia football prominent in his Bainbridge office. “We couldn’t be happier here,” Joe Mullholland said. “If people just give him a little time there will be a national championship up in Athens before too long.”
To the retired defensive back coach, the one who sat directly left of Smart the afternoon in 1994 when he signed his commitment to Georgia in the library of the old Bainbridge High. “He’s done just what I always thought he could do,” Mike Jones said.
The emotions accompanying every coaching change like this run deeply. Both toward the guy released — Richt, after all, had 15 years at Georgia, building up all kinds of personal connective tissue — and for the guy hired (everyone likes a coming-home saga).
They can run mid-ocean deep for the Bainbridge Bulldogs. When Jones travelled to Athens for the Georgia spring game, he was the one among the 93,000 who teared up when he caught sight of his former player on the field with his new team.
When Stan Killough, Kirby’s former baseball coach and still the athletic director at Bainbridge High, sent a congratulatory text to Smart’s father, it turned into 140 characters of mush. “It got emotional, when I told him how proud I was of Kirby, and of how dreams do come true,” Killough said.
The one person who may not have fully grasped the many nuances of the return of the small-town Georgia kid — the son of a high school football coach, all-SEC as safety and all-SAE on fraternity row at Georgia — is Smart himself.
Between juggling the roles of defensively coordinating Alabama’s national championship and setting a foundation for his new gig in Athens — the overlap lasted 36 long days — Smart has had precious little time to savor what has just happened. The treadmill has had no pause button.
There is one special moment each day, though, that gives Smart a clue that he has achieved something monumental.
“When you pull in and park at the spot marked ‘Head Coach,’ that’s when it hits you,” he said.
Coming from where he did, was there any question he’d one day get that spot, eschewing a perfectly good finance degree from Georgia’s Terry College of Business to sell recruits rather than investors?
Even before arriving at Georgia, he possessed a knack for the game. “Before the ball was snapped, he got it, he knew what was coming,” said Jones, his high school position coach.
And every association Smart made along the way seemed to be leading to this moment. Two of those major influences collided one recent afternoon when a writer phoned Sonny Smart to ask him about his boy.
Suddenly, the dad who moved his family to Bainbridge when Kirby was 7 to take a coaching job (he now lives in North Georgia) and submerse his son in the culture of football sounded an awful lot like the coach Kirby had worked for the past 10 years.
“We’re going with the one-voice protocol,” Sonny said, adopting a phrasing that was as Nick Saban as any of his five national championships.
“Yeah, I put that on (his father). Want to keep family life private. I told him to refer everybody to me,” Kirby said.
The first-time head coach has been quick to seize on the concept of complete message control, from the pater familias on down. That is a Saban specialty, one of several that Smart has borrowed for use at Georgia (be that such mundane matters as scheduling practices and media availability or the splashy stuff like arriving at an Atlanta football camp in a bright yellow helicopter).
When Smart pushed for fans to fill up Sanford Stadium for the spring game — and they responded — it was because he had witnessed such a spectacle in Tuscaloosa. When he and his staff chartered more flights than ever before at Georgia, it was because where he came from, they had the fattest recruiting budget in the conference.
“Kirby hasn’t pitched any wild ideas,” the athletic director who hasn’t yet said no, Georgia’s Greg McGarity.
“Kirby is no different than other coaches,” he said. “There will always be a to-do list. So far the communication has been very strong. It has been very invigorating and refreshing.”
What, as he inevitably takes from each of his coaching stops along the way, Smart should try to be more like Valdosta State than dynastic Bama?
“You never leave what you learn,” Smart said. “What you have success with, (what) you feel comfortable with, you always rely on that a little bit.
“Certainly there’s a great deal learned (from Saban). Ways to handle certain situations, ways to handle players, ways to improve your team. That will always stay with me. There’s certainly differences as well, and those are important to me.”
This much we know about Smart before he oversees his first play as a head coach — Sept. 3 inside the Georgia Dome vs. North Carolina.
What he doesn’t know, he’ll learn. So said the fellow who made the call to exchange Richt for Smart.
“That’s something we talked about when we talked about the job,” McGarity said. “How are you wired as far as continuous learning? That was at the top of Kirby’s list.
“If you are wired that way you have a chance to be great. But if you are not wired that way and you don’t look outward and you don’t look to develop a deep network of friends and counterparts, you can be good but you can never be great.”
He already is an accomplished sloganeer. The mantra of Attack the Day has been only a bit more popular than the acronym W.I.N. – What’s Important Now.
“There’s a lot of energy around the program right now,” center Brandon Kublanow said.
One thing Smart hasn’t stressed to his team is how much better things were in his day or given them a dramatic retelling of each of his 13 career interceptions.
“I want my players to play better than me,” Smart said.
Because of his Georgia ties and the reach of his reputation the past decade, Smart has been an effective calming agent for the trauma that came with parting with a popular long-tenured predecessor. McGarity has witnessed that during a couple of offseason engagements in which Smart seemed to be a classmate of everyone in the room.
Because of his respect for Richt, former Georgia lineman Matt Stinchcomb said his reaction to the coaching change was “kind of muddied.”
“As potentially confusing as it might have been, I found myself very excited because not only was (Smart) a former teammate, but also because I think he is a great fit,” he said.
Stinchcomb looks at the small sample size of Smart’s work as the Bulldogs head coach — be that recruiting inroads, or ramping up the momentum for improved facilities, or displaying a public ease with being the guy who has to answer all the questions now — and declares that the Bulldogs have “won in every way that you can win in the offseason.”
Now, just win during the season, and demonstrate a command for the game beyond just the defense.
His former coach likes what he sees when he takes inventory. “He has a championship mentality,” said Jim Donnan, who replaced Ray Goff at Georgia in 1996. “He has an aggressive nature. He’s one of the best recruiters in the country, bar none. And he’ll demand a lot from the players while being a good guy to play for.”
Such characteristics tend to ramp up aspirations.
No wonder back in Bainbridge, the state attorney is quite bent on pursuing the case that the local guy will win big. “Kirby has shown the ability to do it,” Mulholland said. “He can get them over that last hump.”
And should a Georgia championship happen again in this lifetime, Miss Georgia 2014 might have a little company out there on the county line.
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