According to KentWired.com, senior Deon Edwin approached Coach Rob Senderoff with the idea.

“It takes courage for our players to make a statement like this, and I believe it is a representation of the unity in our campus community,” Senderoff told the Associated Press. “There’s a lot of people protesting the national anthem, or protesting the election, or religion. You see all of that nationally, and our guys wanted to make a statement. To me, it was a tremendously positive statement. Hopefully everybody can recognize that. I have a lot of African American players on my team, and they have faced discrimination because of the color of their skin.”

According to school spokesman Eugene Canal, the gesture was so effective because no one in the crowd expected it.

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“It went very well. It came off very organic,” he told ESPN’s Jeff Goodman. “All the players went into the stands and picked people from the crowd. Everyone came down on the court and was arm-to-shoulder. Fans seemed to really appreciate it.

“It was cool because I don’t think anyone in the crowd knew what was going on. None of the fans knew about it beforehand.”

Said point guard Jalen Avery: “We understand all of the issues going on in our world. In these times, we felt it was important to show a sign of unity in our community. Our meaning behind it was to let everybody aware of all the things that are going on in our country know that we wanted to make a stand for unity. That was basically our symbol, and we wanted to treat everybody as one.”