Beal and Anderson’s appearance are the latest NBA representatives to campaign against gun violence: The league partnered with the organization Everytown for Gun Safety for an advertisement campaign advocating to end gun violence. The spots featured a few star players, including Steph Curry and Carmelo Anthony, and launched during the NBA’s five-game slate of Christmas day games, its most prominent national platform during the regular season.

The White House reached out to the Wizards on Saturday to inquire if any players would be available to attend Tuesday’s event. The team had a practice scheduled at the same time as the address so only Beal and Anderson, both nursing injuries, were available. They sat in the front row in the East Room, just left of Obama and in full view of the television camera feeding the national broadcast as the president delivered an emotional speech outlining new firearms restrictions.

“It was awesome. To represent my teammates and the league, period, and myself and my family,” Beal said. “To stand up for a cause that’s tragic in our world. It was kind of a no-brainer for me to go. The whole speech in itself, the atmosphere, it was something different.”

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Beal said Obama’s speech hit him on a personal level because it cited rising gun violence in Missouri specifically. Beal, 22, a native of St. Louis, said a couple of childhood friends of his have been shot and killed in the last couple years.

“It’s hard because given where you from, it’s hard,” Beal said. “There’s violence, there’s gang violence. There’s everything. And there’s access to a gun within seconds and it’s always tragic to know it could be anybody, at any given point, at any given time, no matter who you are, where you are or what you’re doing. And that’s the sad part about it. But as much as we can and as much as possible, we need to stand on it.”

While NBA’s ad campaign on gun violence is unprecedented among professional sports leagues, individual NBA players have taken political stands in recent years. In 2012, LeBron James and several of his Miami Heat teammates wore hooded sweatshirts in protest of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Florida teenager. Two years later, James, who since moved on to the Cleveland Cavaliers, and other players around the league warmed up in T-shirts that read “I can’t breathe,” a reference to the final words of Eric Garner, who died after New York police placed him in a chokehold.

With political stands come criticism and debate, but Anderson and Beal insisted they weren’t going to shy away from expressing their sentiments.