It’s Beamer’s Time: Gamecocks introduce their new football coach, 2020-style
Monday afternoon represented a dream come true, even if the setting wasn’t quite what Shane Beamer had visualized.
Beamer’s had the dream since he was a little boy. When he was 9 or 10, he used to sit on the back deck of his parents’ home in Blacksburg, Virginia, wearing a Fisher-Price toy headset and barking out football plays to his neighborhood friends on the grass below.
The son of hall of fame Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer, Shane was born to be a head coach. It didn’t matter how often his dad and others warned him about the rigors of the lifestyle. The vision has always been the same: One day an athletic director would announce Shane Beamer as his school’s next head coach.
That day came Monday, and that athletic director was South Carolina’s Ray Tanner. For years, Beamer had imagined he’d step to the front of the room and see his wife and children, rows of seats filled with reporters and friends and peers. Instead, he stepped up to a room of approximately a dozen people, all wearing masks and spread apart.
Beamer’s family stayed home. So did reporters. Beamer stepped to the podium, pulled down his face mask, and took questions via Zoom.
“This is something that I’ve been preparing for,” Beamer said of becoming a head coach. “And you envision how it’s gonna go. It certainly wasn’t like this in my dream, staring at you guys on a screen and not having my family here.
“But the excitement and the emotion of being the head coach of South Carolina has only been stronger than what I envisioned it being — getting that call from Tanner.”
That emotion is real. Beamer held back tears at multiple points throughout the news conference as he discussed just how much Columbia, South Carolina and the opportunity of becoming a first-time head coach means to him, his wife Emily and their three children.
A 21-year assistant coach who coached linebackers, cornerbacks and special teams at USC from 2007 to 2010, Beamer has never been a head coach, but he’s had the opportunity to learn from some of the most renowned coaches in the game, including his father and former Gamecocks coach Steve Spurrier.
Tanner interviewed Beamer for more than five hours at one point the last three weeks, grilling him on his resume and experience, and the athletic director said Monday that he was struck by the amount of preparation Beamer put into the process. At one point, he gave Tanner an iPad that was pre-loaded with Beamer’s plan for the Gamecocks program.
“It seems like yesterday that coach Beamer was here on campus,” Tanner said. “It has been 10 years. And he made an impact.
“He’s been away for quite a while, but he has a tremendous desire to be here. … It has been evident for a long time. I appreciated his experience and what he’s been through, the preparation. For a long time he’s been preparing to become a head coach.”
Beamer’s contract details have not yet been formalized, Tanner said. The contract will be presented to the school’s board of trustees for approval Dec. 15. Tanner declined to disclose contract length or salary, although TheBigSpur and SportsTalkSC reported a $2.75 million annual salary.
Despite Beamer’s lack of head-coaching experience, both Tanner and USC President Bob Caslen expressed the desire for Beamer to build a championship culture and to win sooner rather than later. Tanner told Beamer that he always tells his coaches to “reload” instead of “rebuild.”
Beamer didn’t shy away from that mentality Monday, pointing out lessons he’s learned from winners like Spurrier and his father. But Beamer also emphasized the importance of trust and building genuine, authentic relationships with his players and with the community. Trust, he said, is the reason why he intends to stay with Oklahoma through the end of its season.
Those relationships mean everything to Beamer. Throughout the past couple of weeks, he’d heard from countless former players supporting him for the USC job.
“Obviously, Saturdays are important,” Beamer said. “Wins and losses are what you’re judged on. But the opportunity to have an impact on a young man’s life and have a guy like Marcus Lattimore call me out of the blue and and tell me stories of things that I barely remembered. He talks about conversations we had. A guy like Connor Shaw, driving home from work two weeks ago ... I’ve heard from so many of them over the last couple of weeks.
“Thank you. This is your program. I’m honored to be your head football coach.”
This story was originally published December 7, 2020 at 6:15 PM.
