Shane Beamer reveals toughest part of transition to head coaching role

Shane Beamer arrived at South Carolina with a sense of how he wanted to run his program — but nothing could have prepared him for the agenda of what it takes to be a head coach in the SEC.

“There is a lot that I probably wasn’t prepared for. I’ve been around coaching all my life because of my dad, and then being in coaching as long as I had before I got the head coaching job — I didn’t realize just the amount of stuff you deal with that has nothing to do with football,” Beamer said earlier this offseason on an episode of Next Up with Adam Breneman. “There’s so much to deal with when you get hired.

“Recruiting, hiring the staff, getting to know all of the players. Keeping the players here and not transferring, donors, my bosses — so many things.”

Beamer has asserted South Carolina in the recruiting and transfer portal games from the moment he arrived in Columbia. Still, the initial blow of becoming a head coach nearly knocked him off his feet at first.

“I thought I had a pretty good handle on it, a pretty good plan for the first five days, 50 days, 60 days — all that,” Beamer said. “This was all blown up. There are just so many things that come across your desk. Everybody needs something, everybody has a question … It was a lot coming at me in a short period of time. That was probably a bit overwhelming.”

Beamer revealed that a handful of head coaches — who he did not name — rang his phone to tell him that everything he’s going through is normal. They know what he had to go through because they’ve gone through it themselves. Nobody’s ready for their first head coaching job, so his fellow coaches told him to hang in there.

It seems that Beamer has stayed true to the process, as the Gamecocks ended 2023 as one of the hottest teams in the country. The Gamecocks won three of their last four games, including the final two against top 10 opponents Clemson and Notre Dame, respectively.

Still, South Carolina ended the season 8-5 overall and 4-4 in SEC play, though, it’s an improvement from 2021’s 7-6 record — which was Beamer’s first as head coach.

He has compiled a 15-11 record since taking over the day-to-day operations of the Gamecocks football program and looks to build on that further once the 2023 season kicks off. South Carolina’s campaign gets underway on Sept. 2 against North Carolina in Charlotte.