Where Shane Beamer is looking to expand South Carolina recruiting operation nationally
The heart of South Carolina football’s recruiting efforts will always stay close to home.
The Palmetto State is the base, of course. Georgia is right there, perpetually ripe with talent, as is North Carolina, especially the Charlotte area right over the border. Florida is Florida — everyone seemingly across the country goes there — and sometimes the Gamecocks dip into parts of Alabama.
And new USC head coach Shane Beamer has a few plans for what he wants the program’s recruiting map to look like.
“Go where there’s players, you know?” Beamer said. “I’ve always recruited this region and have a lot of ties and I’ve recruited North Carolina. I’ve recruited South Carolina, I’ve recruited Georgia, I’ve recruited Florida. I’ve been in Tennessee recruiting. Obviously I’m from Virginia. We’ve had a great amount of success with players from Virginia and Washington, DC, and Maryland, and that’s an area that I want to continue to tap into.”
The Gamecocks started making in-roads in Virginia with assistant coach Kyle Krantz last season. That was a slight expansion of the core area that the Muschamp staff focused on, which was primarily South Carolina, the three border states, plus a little of Alabama and a lot of Florida. (They also plucked Ryan Hilinski from California, a specialist from Chicago and highly rated running back MarShawn Lloyd from the DC area).
The previous staff did some work in the Northeast, specifically Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Beamer explained that his most recent job required taking a little more of a global perspective at a national power with not much talent within the state’s borders.
“A great experience for me, too, was being at Oklahoma,” Beamer said. “The University of Oklahoma is in a state that doesn’t produce a lot of Power 5 football players each and every year. So because of that, we had to recruit nationally at Oklahoma. So I was able to develop ties really anywhere throughout the country.”
In the last cycle, he was listed as the primary recruiter for quarterback Caleb Williams, a Washington, D.C.-area product who was the No. 6 recruit in the country.
Beamer, who specializes in building relationships, a day or two into his USC tenure said he’d already heard from a range of in-state high school coaches, all the way up to Virginia.
A couple players from that state were among those who decommitted from South Carolina after Will Muschamp was fired.
When he was introduced as the new Gamecocks coach, Beamer made reference to the batch of high-profile in-state players he helped recruit in his time as a USC assistant: Alshon Jeffery, Marcus Lattimore, Stephon Gilmore, DeVonte Holloman and Jadeveon Clowney. He also mentioned the three- or four-hour radius around Columbia that he expects to build from.
His current class has 10 members. He’ll have 11 more spots to play with, to fill with talent from the high school, junior college and transfer ranks, unless the NCAA expands that limit. And he had a small message he wanted to get across as he starts trying to add talent to a roster that could use some more.
“If you’re a guy in this state, if you’re a young man in this state, understanding that you can accomplish all of your goals on and off the field right here in Columbia,” Beamer said. “And you don’t have to go anywhere else to do that.”
