Why Will Muschamp is finding the Zoom lifestyle particularly painful
South Carolina football coach Will Muschamp will admit to not being technically sound.
He’s joked about learning about Nexflix during the coronavirus pandemic. He’s had to pick up the ins and outs of running a team over video conferencing, most often Zoom.
Not only is he not a fan, but he was particularly descriptive when talking about it to Mark Packer on SiriusXM radio.
“The Zooms have been painful for me,” Muschamp said. “I have to have Joe Lisle, our video guy, or George Wynn, our operations guy, set it up because I can’t. I just, I struggle I get frustrated and it’s been hard.”
In some ways, he might be in the same boat as his former boss. In another interview, his old teammate and coworker, Kirby Smart, joked about having to lug tapes around for Nick Saban, even though all the film was on computers by that point (Saben wanted it in case the computers went down).
The staff has been doing position meetings over Zoom since the NCAA allowed it during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. It might be OK for position meetings or even presentations like the small-scale coaching clinics the staff did, but it starts to get stretched with a team-wide meeting about the state of racial injustice in America, which the team had at one point as players started returning to campus.
“We’ve had a lot of really, you know, positive talks and I think we’ve made a lot of progress,” Muschamp said. “But you don’t get to look somebody in the eyeball. You don’t get to see their body language. You don’t get to see what they’re thinking.”
This pandemic has robbed college football of a slew of in-person interactions. The recruiting process, centrally the evaluation period and the 10 camps days, all moments when coaches can observe or work with players and those around them, were all wiped away.
The team has even been doing position meetings on Zoom despite players being back in Columbia and on campus. The team will start having actual walkthroughs in late July, but it’s unclear how much longer Muschamp will have to deal with the ins and outs of video conferencing just to chat with his guys.
“It’s just frustrating to be on it,” Muschamp said. “But that’s all we have right now that’s what everybody’s dealing with that that part’s been frustrating.”
This story was originally published June 25, 2020 at 5:20 AM.
