How a principal helped Mazeo Bennett's development at WR

Mazeo Bennett may only be a freshman at South Carolina, but the wide receiver is quickly making a name for himself.

After an impressive several weeks of spring practices, the Greenville, SC native will head into fall camp with a real possibility of competing for early playing time. While he still has a ways to go, it’s evident that Bennett is advanced for his grade.

So what’s been his secret? It’s been training with his principal, Bobby McGowens.

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“Honestly, coach McGowens has taught me everything I know about being a wide receiver until I got to college,” said Bennett, of his once principal at Woodmont Middle School. “Really, even when I got to college, he’s still been in my ear about certain things… Whether that’s leverage, terminology, catching the ball, how to be able to make a play after you catch the ball. Just small stuff like that. Coach McGowens really taught me everything about the wide receiver position.”

In the 90’s, McGowens was a standout basketball player at McDuffie High School (Anderson, SC). Earning South Carolina AA Player of the Year honors, he went on to help his team win the 1993 state title.

What Bennett didn’t realize was that McGowens went on to finish his college career as a two-sport star at South Carolina State where he’d become the program’s all-time receiving leader. Following a career in the Arena Football League, McGowens began training wide receivers “around 2003.” That would lead him to serving as an assistant coach with stops including at Pendleton High School and North Carolina Central.

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“I was already training him in basketball. He knew I was a basketball coach and trainer but he didn’t know I was a football trainer too,” said McGowens. “His eighth grade we started (football) training, very consistently. It kind of just bloomed and blossomed from there.

“Day one, he was a little skinny and a little slow,” recalled McGowens. “The things you see now, you didn’t see then but what you saw was someone who was highly competitive, high character, and a really good worker — he was an excellent worker. He has a great work ethic.”

Making the jump to playing high school football, Bennett continued to put the work in. Even during a time in which he wasn’t sure if there was even going to be a season.

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“After we got out of school we’d just go to the field and get some work in and we just kept on, kept on, kept on to the summer when COVID hit and we really couldn’t do anything. So we were just working out almost every day. 90 degree weather, we were getting in that work.”

Going on to score 44 touchdowns during his high school career with more than 2,600 yards of total offense and 103 receptions, Bennett’s commitment to excellent earned him 4A Region 1 Player of the Year his senior year. It also turned him into a four-star prospect and one of the top wide outs in his recruiting class.

“Once he got into high school, ninth/tenth grade you started to see him separate himself from the pack. When we started working, we worked on things to build that foundation. From his stance and starts, eliminating false steps at the line of scrimmage, and then we worked on a lot about pace. Teaching how to go slow, how to go fast, how to go medium to create that indecision in a DB’s mind to create that separation. We did a lot of press releases, off-hand releases, one, two, three-step… he just absorbed all those things very quickly.”

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With Bennett enrolling into South Carolina this past January, McGowens isn’t training the freshman wide out nearly as much as he used to. While he’ll continue to workout with Bennett and provide him advice when the two can, he believes the Gamecocks’ newly hired wide receiver coach Mike Furrey will only make Bennett better.

“I know coach Furrey personally,” said McGowens. “He brought his son to a training session so I was able to pick his brain a little bit. His son is gonna be an amazing talent, also. But just (Furrey’s) knowledge of the game and the levels that he’s played at gives you the impression that not only does he know the game, he played the game and he knows how to motivate. He knows how to make connections with the athletes. He knows what it takes to get to that level, how to stay at that level, and how to accomplish their end goals.”

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