Shane Beamer looks back at his time with Kirby Smart, what he learned

Once upon a time, say, five or six years ago, two SEC East rivals were actually coworkers. Second-year South Carolina coach Shane Beamer once served as the special teams and tight ends coach under Kirby Smart during his first years at Georgia. Now as the head of his own major program, Beamer revealed recently that he stole plenty of tricks from Smart.

When asked about Smart’s impact on his own coaching career ahead of South Carolina’s game vs. Georgia this weekend, Beamer was more than happy to give credit to his former mentor, saying he learned how to build a program from the ground up from Smart.

“Yeah, Kirby Smart made me a better football coach. It was a really beneficial two years to be with him. And him coming, it was a great opportunity for me to coach at a place like Georgia, live in a city like Athens. To come in and see the whole Nick Saban, Alabama, the process and all that — but see it implemented from day one where, Kirby taking over a program.”

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“I came in there at the end of December, right when he first got hired, after we won our bowl game at Virginia Tech. And then to be able to see everything implemented in year one and, you know, that year was not easy. I mean, we lost to Vanderbilt at home, we lost to Georgia Tech at home, struggled to beat Nicholls State early in the season at home. But then to see how just recruiting-wise and continuing to build that program to where, in year two, we went and won the Rose Bowl and played for the National Championship.”

Getting to watch Kirby Smart, a first-time head coach himself, build an eventual championship-winning program from ground zero was a great teaching guide for Beamer. So he is now trying to emulate a lot of what Coach Smart did early on in Athens. But also, South Carolina isn’t building Georgia 2.0. Shane Beamer is still implementing his own flourishes to the team as well.

“Seeing how he handled coaches. Seeing how he handled the day-to-day stuff, the recruiting part of it, practice. I mean, there’s a lot of things that we do here that are directly from things that I took from my time at Georgia. And there’s things that we don’t do. We do a lot of things differently as well.

“But when you talk about all the places that I’ve been as a coach and coaches that I’ve taken things from — as far as this organization and how we try and structure stuff, a lot of it came from my time with Kirby. Certainly really appreciative of that opportunity that he gave me and everything that I learned from him.”