Kinlaw took winding road to second chance with Gamecocks

There’s a lot Caleb Kinlaw likes about being back in his home state and a part of the South Carolina football program.

The running back has a good bond with the Gamecocks coaching staff and likes many of his new teammates. The weather is more bearable for a Low Country kid than Madison, Wisconsin’s frigid winters.

It helps that no one is trying to make him a defensive back.

“I’m very happy,” Kinlaw said. “That was not working out.”

The former Goose Creek star was languishing at Wisconsin. He was hurt his first season, played a little in his second, but was then in limbo over his position.

He left after the 2015 season, and after a year at Pearl River Community College, took a non-traditional path home – walking on at USC.

The redshirt junior said USC running backs coach Bobby Bentley was a big part of what brought him to Columbia. They’d talked as far back as when Kinlaw left Wisconsin and common ties brought them together.

“I’d heard about Caleb, being from the state of South Carolina,” Bentley said. “I’d met some of his family members and they said he wanted to transfer here. So I got to meet with him. I told him, we didn’t have a scholarship. We weren’t signing a running back this year. And I kept hammering it and kept recruiting him just like I was recruiting a scholarship player. I just didn’t have a scholarship for him.”

Kinlaw said that approach resonated. That makes sense given Kinlaw’s history.

Kinlaw committed to Badgers running backs coach Thomas Hammock, who left the team for the Baltimore Ravens shortly after Signing Day. Former Georgia back Thomas Brown took over for 2014, initially stayed on after head coach Gary Andersen left and Paul Chryst took over, and then departed for Georgia after Signing Day the next year. Kinlaw played the 2015 season under veteran Wisconsin assistant John Settle, getting into one game.

Counting a junior college stint, Bentley is Kinlaw’s fifth position coach.

“(We) are getting along really well,” Kinlaw said. “I think our relationship is better than my previous running back relationships. I know that I can go to him, and he’s going to tell me what it is and what it’s not. I don’t have to worry about guessing or anything like that.”

He said his running style has changed after going through the Big Ten. In high school, he was the outside guy in Goose Creek’s vaunted triple-option offense (The Gators went 49-4 in his career and he ran for 5,498 yards).

“The offense in Wisconsin was a little more downhill,” Kinlaw said. “We did less running out of the gun. High school was just a straight Power I, triple option, so it’s definitely much different.”

In Columbia, chances are he’ll be running mostly from shotgun, but said he’s not partial to any particular offense.

He’s part of a crowded backfield, with last year’s contributors, Rico Dowdle and A.J. Turner, plus North Carolina transfer Ty’Son Williams and a couple other scholarship backs. The message to the players: don’t worry about depth and just play, things will sort themselves out.

But Bentley isn’t counting Kinlaw out of anything.

“He’s talented,” Bentley said. “He’s fun to watch.”

This story was originally published April 11, 2017 at 6:21 PM with the headline "Kinlaw took winding road to second chance with Gamecocks."