What Shane Beamer learned from Spurrier, other college football greats
South Carolina Gamecocks head football coach Shane Beamer has worked for some of the game’s very best coaches.
The list covers history-making head men from both the old guard and the new school.
Before getting his first head coaching job, Beamer learned under (chronological order) George O’Leary, Phillip Fulmer, Sylvester Croom, Steve Spurrier, Frank Beamer, Kirby Smart, and Lincoln Riley.
That group has built programs, with a host of conference and national titles between them.
Beamer, a meticulous note-taker, has mentioned on numerous occasions how he’s taken bits and pieces from what he’s seen from his bosses at his former programs while maintaining his own identity and program culture.
The third-year head coach recently spoke with On3’s Jesse Simonton and broke down what he has learned from his past stops.
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Sylvester Croom gave Shane Beamer his first head coaching job.
“You hear coaches talk all the time about how they’re in it for the kids, they’re going to do things the right way,” Beamer said of the SEC’s first African American head football coach. “That man was. He is a high character, and had as much influence on me as a coach and person as anybody I’ve been around.”
Steve Spurrier hired Beamer to the program he would eventually take over back in 2007, with Beamer’s first stint as an assistant with the Gamecocks lasting four seasons. In 2022, Beamer received the Steve Spurrier First-Year Coach Award for his work in Columbia.
“Swagger. You always hear about how teams take on the personality of their head coach and I think the teams he had here did. He was a guy who expected to win and he did. He was always loose and confident, and I think our team fed off that,” Beamer told On3.
Frank Beamer, Shane’s father, built the Virginia Tech from the ground up. Shane waited quite some time, forging his own coaching path, before eventually joining his dad in Blacksburg for a stint.
“Consistency. He never got too high or too low, and that’s really helped me as a head coach,” Beamer told Simonton. “Whether it be a tough loss or an unbelievable win, when you came back in the building the next day, dad was the same person. That’s one of the biggest things I took from him as a coach.”
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Beamer was an assistant for Kirby Smart’s first two seasons of Georgia, with year two resulting in an appearance in the national title game.
Said Beamer of Smart: “Very intense, but he has a great sense of urgency every single day. He made me a better coach. Those were two really, really good years in Athens because I learned a lot about how to run a program. He taught me a lot.”
The Gamecocks administration hired Beamer away from Norman, Oklahoma, where he was working under then-head coach. Lincoln Riley.
“Very innovative,” said Beamer. “He was so good at watching tape and seeing what a team did to an opponent the week before and how he could attack it or do something off of that. He had a great feel for his team as well. He was an offensive coach, the quarterbacks coach, but he had a great feel for the entire team.”
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