In the long offseason coaches are off on spring speaking tours and the topics shift from less of the day-to-day, nitty-gritty of team dynamics and more to big-picture questions like the transfer portal and NIL.
South Carolina coach Shane Beamer has expressed his philosophy on the transfer portal pretty clearly.
“I don’t ever want to say we’re going to sign 20 portal guys a year and that’s how we’re going to build our roster,” Beamer said. “I just think it’s hard to build a team year to year and sustain it year to year doing that.
“But we certainly want to be able to have the bulk of our class come from the high school ranks and then being able to supplement it year to year from the portal, whether it be with a Spencer Rattler or the guys, Nick Gargiulo and some of the great guys that we’ve brought in that we’ve had that we’ve had success with from the transfer portal. So we’ll always utilize it.”
South Carolina has been a program pretty close to net neutral in terms of the transfer portal when it comes to impact players. They’ve lost quality players like MarShawn Lloyd and Jaheim Bell, but they’ve also added quality guys like Rattler and Rocket Sanders.
Despite those additions, Beamer still looks more big-picture. He knows you need excellent high school recruiting too.
“I always want to start with high school recruiting, always,” he said. “I believe that’s how you build your roster and to me the best teams are the ones that you’ve brought players in as freshmen, you develop them and then they’re there for their third, fourth, fifth year in the program.”
For the most part, South Carolina has done just that. Like everyone, the Gamecocks have had some attrition to the transfer portal. Even from some elite players. Still, the overall operation is working as intended.
Beamer even pointed out how much of this year’s team’s veteran leadership will come from homegrown talent.
“I talk about it at these events, we’ve got I think 12 players who have been here since 2020, which is really pretty cool in the portal era,” he said. “So I would always love, I always want to start with high school recruiting. I’d love to be able to sign 25 guys a year, you keep them for four years and you develop your roster that way. Those guys get to be juniors and seniors, they’re older guys and they’ve been around your program a while.”
That’s not always going to be possible. Because of the program’s recruiting base, sometimes South Carolina will need to step outside of the high school ranks and head to the transfer portal to make ends meet.
“I don’t know if that’s as sustainable here as maybe it is at other schools because of frankly the size of the state,” Beamer said. “There’s not as many SEC football players coming out of South Carolina every year than there are Texas, California, Florida, those type of places. So you’ve got to be creative.”
So what does Beamer look for in his transfers?
“It’s when those guys fit what we’re about on and off the field and they’re looking for what we’re offering from an opportunity standpoint,” he said. “But high school recruiting we haven’t put any less importance on that. Our coaches are out recruiting right now and are attacking it harder than we ever have.”
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