‘Competitive toughness’: The story behind South Carolina’s nighttime football drills
Scroll through the social media feeds of South Carolina football and its new coaching staff and you’ll inevitably stumble across what appears to be some of the most intense games of tug-of-war you’ll ever see.
After dark, under the lights at the Gamecocks’ practice facility, players are strapped into harnesses, each trying to drag the other in the opposite direction, clawing and scrambling as their teammates yell and cheer around them. When one player wins, he’s mobbed as if he just delivered the winning play in a championship game.
There are other videos and photos too, of players going head-to-head trying to pull weights out of the other’s hands, sprinting and scrambling back and forth in races — always at night.
Head coach Shane Beamer calls these “competitive toughness” drills, he told The State in an interview earlier this week.
“Those things have been fantastic for us. We call them competitive toughness,” Beamer said. “The videos you’ve been seeing, that’s literally, 15, 20 minutes of an hour that we’re out on the field. And 40 minutes of it is the football part of it, where it’s just walking through and kind of installing schemes, but it’s a good 15, 20 minutes of competing and get getting after it. And that’s been the best thing, is being able to watch our guys compete, who will get in there and battle.”
The NCAA recently approved a waiver allowing teams to spend 10 hours per week on athletic-related activities, up from the usual eight. Of those 10, only a few can be spent actually on the field. When Beamer started his first offseason program with USC, he had to deal with a little bit of a schedule quirk.
“Our players do everything in the mornings. That was the way the spring semester was set, schedule-wise, because coach (Will) Muschamp had practice in the mornings previously and our spring class schedules were already set before I got hired,” Beamer said. “So we did not want to take time away from (strength coach) Luke Day and our strength and conditioning staff in the weight room.”
That’s hardly surprising, considering Beamer pushed back the start of spring practices in part so that the Gamecock players could spend more time in the weight room with a new strength staff.
“Our guys, we have three different lifting groups four days a week, they’re either at 7 a.m., 8:45, or 10:30. And we didn’t want to take away any of that time to do anything with them,” Beamer said. “And then once they leave here, they go and they have class, academic sessions, tutors, all that stuff. And most of our guys don’t finish up with tutors until around seven o’clock at night. So that’s why we went at night for all these.”
It’s made for an undeniably compelling background to the social media videos. A rotating cast of players has starred in those videos, from senior Kingsley Enagbare to redshirt freshman walk-on Jesse Sanders. The drills haven’t necessarily produced a clear standout, but Beamer indicated he and his staff are closely tracking how everyone performs.
“I think each night is different. It’s been fun to see guys that maybe one night, they go out there, and they don’t have the success that they expected. But then they come out there the next time and they completely dominate,” Beamer said. “And then there’s the group of guys that they don’t say a whole lot. But every single night, when you look at the standings the next day, they’re always right here at the top. And then there’s some guys that maybe we challenge during one to find another gear or another level and they have, and just to be able to see them improve with their mentality and an ability to compete.”
With spring ball scheduled to begin March 20, Beamer will soon have plenty of drills, practices and workouts to evaluate his players. But these competitive toughness challenges have given him some early insight into which players excel more going head-to-head against an opponent as opposed to being “workout warriors.”
“There’s been a lot of, I wouldn’t say surprises. But it’s interesting, because they have been in the weight room since January. So January, February is all weight room,” Beamer said. “And then to see guys that maybe were great in the weight room, but for whatever reason haven’t been as great out there in some of those competitive drills, or maybe guys you didn’t notice as much in the weight room, they’re absolutely killing it out there in some of those competitive drills, that part’s been fun to kind of see as it unfolds.”
