For the first time in 192 days, the Gamecocks played sports. Here’s what happened
Mark Berson has coached every match the South Carolina men’s soccer team has ever played. He’s the winningest active coach in the country.
But he had never coached a game during a pandemic. No USC coach had.
On Saturday night, Berson’s Gamecocks played the first USC sporting event in 192 days, in front of a limited-capacity crowd at Stone Stadium. It was the 839th game of Berson’s career — and surely it must have felt a little different from the other 838?
“It was exactly the same,” Berson said. “The same alertness, the same excitement getting ready for the game, same process that we’re going through, same checklists of things we’re going to do for the match. And for the university to open the first athletic event and to have a beautiful evening, where we had a fine crowd, obviously limited due to the situation, I think we sold out the student tickets actually. It was overall really good.”
Even better for the Gamecocks, the night ended in a win.
USC defeated visiting Georgia Southern 2-0 to give Berson his 515th career victory, which is only 29 shy of the all-time Division I record.
The game is the first of at least five that USC will play this fall in a disjointed season. The Gamecocks won’t take on conference opponents until Feb. 3 based on Conference USA guidelines.
The USC women’s soccer team opened its fall season Sunday at Georgia. The Gamecocks football team hosts Tennessee this Saturday in both teams’ first games of a revamped 2020 schedule. The volleyball program’s abbreviated schedule begins Oct. 17.
In his 42 second year at the helm, Berson had announced in January that he would be retiring after this season, leaving the program he founded in 1978. Berson said Thursday that he intends to coach through both the abbreviated fall season and the spring and said he still plans to retire. Still, given the strangeness of the year, those plans aren’t necessarily set in stone.
“I’m just taking every day as it comes, and we’ll just kind of see how things roll,” Berson said. “My big thing with these guys is, they have worked so hard to get ready for this fall. And it’s a really an exciting group.”
Berson is especially excited about the progress he’s seen in his sophomores, who were thrust into action during last year’s injury-riddled season. On Saturday night, sophomore forwards Logan Frost and Brian Banahan steered the offensive attack.
Assisted by Banahan, Frost scored the first goal of the season in the 31st minute. And with nine seconds left in the game, Banahan tacked on a goal of his own.
Frost said it “meant a lot” to him to score that first goal after all of the uncertainty the team has faced in recent months. With the conference slate moved back, there was no guarantee the Gamecocks would even play games this fall. The team has been training for the past two months, getting tested for the coronavirus regularly and mimicking a bubble-type of environment.
“Honestly, it’s pretty hard, because there’s a lot of rules we have to follow and a lot of things we’re prohibited from doing, which we weren’t last year,” Frost said. “So it is a big transition. But after tonight, I mean, it was worth it.
“It was super fun to actually be able to play. And that goes to the administration and Ray Tanner and all the coaches for helping show us what we really need to do to be able to play and what rules need to be in place to allow us to play.”
Women’s soccer team drops opener
At Athens, South Carolina lost 1-0 Sunday to Georgia in both teams’ 2020 opener. The match was played at the Turner Soccer Complex. The Bulldogs scored the lone goal in the 63rd minute.
The Gamecocks host Missouri at Stone Stadium at 4 p.m. next Sunday.
This story was originally published September 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
