Shane Beamer explains why his interview with South Carolina happened in Atlanta

Former Oklahoma assistant Shane Beamer didn’t meet with South Carolina officials in Columbia, South Carolina or Norman, Oklahoma as he interviewed for the Gamecocks head coaching job.

Instead, the meeting took place in Atlanta, Georgia, as both sides worked to keep the interview as quiet as possible.

Beamer spoke with Adam Breneman on the Next Up with Adam Breneman podcast about why his interview was held in Atlanta.

“I guess it was in Atlanta because that was a central meeting point. You know how it is, with a lot of these searches, everybody tries to track planes and all this stuff. And there were some rumors that had come out. I remember that ‘we had interviewed in Oklahoma City’ or something like that. And that never happened, at all,” Shane Beamer said.

“So what we were going to do is Oklahoma was scheduled to play West Virginia that weekend, I think. And that game got postponed because of COVID, or canceled because of COVID. And initially we were going to meet in Morgantown, West Virginia on the Friday night before the West Virginia-Oklahoma game. … So when that game got postponed, we just shifted.”

The change in venue worked out well for Beamer. Instead of having only a couple of hours to meet with Gamecocks AD Ray Tanner and other South Carolina officials, there were no time restraints since Beamer didn’t have a game to coach in the following day.

That led to a six-hour interview, which went well for Beamer and is now working out well for the Gamecocks.

“We checked into a hotel and we sat in a hotel suite for six hours. It was myself and Ray Tanner, our Athletics Director and Chance Miller, who is our Deputy Athletics Director – the three of us. Our president here at South Carolina at the time, he was actually in quarantine because of COVID. So I did a zoom with him,” Beamer said.

“It was them wanting to see, ‘Can you be the CEO? Can you be the face of a program? Coaching staff, guys that you have in mind, who you would want to hire? What does your offense look like? What does your defense look like? Special teams, recruiting philosophy, I mean you name it. Everything from a philosophical standpoint. That’s what we did. It flew by. It really did.”

Beamer landed the South Carolina job and is off to a great start, having taken the Gamecocks from a 2-8 program when he took over to 8-5 last season.

Shane Beamer now has his dream job and it’s working out well for both parties.

“I had been on other interviews before… every interview that I had been on before, there was always this end goal of ending up here at South Carolina. There were jobs that I interviewed for in the past that I remember saying to my wife, ‘If this school were to offer this job, does this get us closer to hopefully coming back to South Carolina one day?’” Beamer recalled.

“So it was very stressful, because it’s one of those, ‘Man, this is something my wife and I have been talking about for 10-plus years, don’t screw this up, Shane.’ … But I had great passion and confidence about what I was talking about.”