Beamer ‘so thankful’ South Carolina pushed back spring practice. Here’s why

Over in Myrtle Beach, Coastal Carolina has already kicked off spring football, but in Columbia, South Carolina football is still more than five weeks away from really hitting the practice field.

New Gamecocks head coach Shane Beamer announced several weeks ago that he tentatively planned to start spring ball on March 20. Now, he finally has all of his on-field assistant coaches, a class of newcomers that have arrived on campus and a full roster to work with.

And with all these new pieces, Beamer is more certain than ever that deciding to push back from the school’s usual starting point of late February/early March was the right call.

“I’m so thankful that we decided to do that. And there’s positives to going earlier and there’s positives to going later, but the fact that we went later is perfect for us this year,” Beamer said. “New staff, we’re trying to get systems implemented. ... I’m doing so many things right now outside of the Xs and Os, that I need to get in there and dive into the schematic stuff with them more and more in depth, and I’ll have time to do that as we go forward.”

In particular, Beamer said he wanted to take the next several weeks before practice begin to hone in on the weight room and new strength coach Luke Day.

“We’re all weight room pretty much right now. As we get a little bit closer to spring practice, we’ll start getting into some football-specific walk throughs and things like that that we’re able to do before we start practice,” Beamer said. “But we got a lot to get done between now and then just from a physical and mental standpoint.”

That development is even more critical, Beamer said, given the “unique” challenges of the past year or so. Day is the third strength coach many South Carolina players have had in the past 16 months, after then-coach Will Muschamp fired Jeff Dillman in Dec. 2019 and replaced him with Paul Jackson. Jackson wasn’t retained as part of Beamer’s new staff, and Day was eventually hired in January, more than a month after Beamer took over.

Add that turnover to the strength and conditioning challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Gamecocks are in sore need of some uninterrupted time in the gym to reshape their bodies, Beamer said. And he likes the early returns.

“Just talking to the guys, they’re all coming off as raving about how stronger they’ve gotten. Kristin (Coggins) in nutrition has done an amazing job with these guys, just as far as like body weights and where we want to get them, getting some guys up, getting some guys down,” Beamer said.