Shane Beamer opens Welcome Home Tour with fan connection, excitement for debut season

Dipping out of a black SUV, Shane Beamer cracked a smile as he headed for a media scrum tucked into a loading dock behind the Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology.

Beamer, now in his first year as the head coach at South Carolina following Will Muschamp’s dismissal, has spent a lifetime at booster club meetings like the one held in Florence on Tuesday as part of the Welcome Home Tour. He traveled the roads of Virginia with his father, Frank, who spent the better part of three decades as the head coach at Virginia Tech.

During his time as an assistant coach at Mississippi State, the younger Beamer was among the assistant coaches who’d travel around the Magnolia State with then-head coach Sylvester Croom.

But for the first time Tuesday, Beamer was no opening act or hungry assistant learning the ways of the spring speaking tours that have become staples around college football. In the large meeting hall at SIMT, a brief 20-minute charter flight from Columbia, Beamer was the main attraction.

“I’ve always enjoyed (the events),” Beamer told reporters. “It’s what makes college athletics so great and I’ve been to a lot of them, but they never get old.”

Last year’s spring tour for Muschamp was canceled by the pandemic. On Tuesday, Beamer spoke to roughly 150 people in Florence before an evening trip to Myrtle Beach. A Greenville trip Wednesday wraps up the May dates for the tour.

Charismatic as they come and a charmer by any standards — let alone the at-times rigid personalities of college football coaches — Beamer has spent the bulk of his early days on the South Carolina job endearing himself to fans.

He appeared at a movie night for undergrads at Williams-Brice Stadium before the school year was up. Beamer later helped a local employee escape a shift at Dick’s Sporting Goods in order to attend the annual Garnet and Black spring game in April.

On Tuesday, he spent 30 minutes signing autographs alongside linebackers coach Mike Peterson — the lone on-field holdover from Muschamp’s staff — and recent hires in men’s soccer coach Tony Annan and swimming and diving coach Jeff Poppell. He posed for pictures and signed posters. A 30-minute state of the program spiel and a question-and-answer session from fans followed.

“Will you throw to the tight end?” one fan asked.

“Will you score at all this year?” another posited to Beamer in recent days.

“It’s a better way to thank the fans when you do it in person, especially with COVID and all of that hitting,” Peterson, who recruits the Florence area and was the first of several assistants slated to join Beamer on his statewide tour, told The State. “You thank them online, you thank them away from it, but to be able to get out and do it in person and let them see you and talking and building relationships, I think that’s bigger than anything.”

In years past, alumni events such as Tuesday’s have served as a chance for coaches to deadpan in-state foes and stir the pot in some of college football’s most fierce rivalries.

Steve Spurrier made headlines when he was the head coach at Florida noting to a group that “you can’t spell Citrus without U-T,” in reference to Tennessee missing the Orange Bowl. He added fuel to the fire when he referred to Florida State as “Free Shoes University.”

Beamer toed the line Tuesday and didn’t quite take the swings Spurrier did, a prerogative earned at least in part to winning a national title in 1996. Prior to the event, he quipped with reporters that he had to scratch off a few of his initial ideas for jokes just to be safe.

Beamer did reveal to onlookers how he’d asked his son, Hunter, who’d brought home his class picture from his new school in Columbia in recent weeks, to roll through those depicted and point out some of the kids he’s made friends with. Hunter retorted without missing a beat, “How about if I just tell you who the three Clemson fans are?”

On Sunday, Beamer and wife Emily walked the grounds of the Ocean Course on Kiawah Island as Phil Mickelson became the oldest golfer in history to win a major title, hosting the Wanamaker trophy as the latest winner of the PGA Championship.

And while Beamer conceded he left well before Mickelson lifted his prize, watching the crowd mob Mickelson as he made his triumphant walk up the 18th hole added an extra excitement as South Carolina’s Sept. 4 opener against Eastern Illinois inches closer by the day.

“Just to see the crowds and the environment down at Kiawah last the weekend and then the think about Williams-Brice Stadium in the fall and the energy and excitement around South Carolina football right now, to have a packed Williams-Brice stadium as we kick it off against Eastern Illinois is something that I couldn’t be more excited about,” he said.