Gamecock sports returned Friday after 192 days off

Mark Berson stood on the sideline, the fall wind whipping around him, watching his team intently, pacing every now and again and occasionally shouting tactical instructions as players sprinted by.

As he paced, a fan who’d spend the entire soccer match shouting from 15 rows up blurted, “I bet you’ve never heard me this clearly before?” and he was right.

Usually the Gamecocks would be playing a season opener in front of a sellout crowd of over 5,000 people but Friday night it was in front of 675.

But for Berson, it really didn’t matter how many people were in the stands. College sports were finally back in Columbia.

“It’s important because of what sport means to our university, to our community, to our state, to our nation. It’s part of the American psyche; it’s part of the American experience. It’s a little bit of normalcy that has to be carefully crafted for the safety of our guys,” Berson said after the game. “It was like a celebration as well as a game for them.”

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For the first time in almost 200 days, a South Carolina athletics team was back playing a competitive game.

It was officially 192 days between softball’s March 11 win over Winthrop and the Gamecocks’ 2-0 win over Georgia Southern on a chilly fall night at Stone Stadium.

But in reality the score was secondary to what the game meant for South Carolina.

The Gamecocks spent half the year waiting and planning for this moment where one of their teams finally got back out there.

The stadium looked different with green stickers dotting available seats, protocol signage plastered at every entrance and masks required for entry (with the majority of the crowd wearing them for the full 90-minute match).

Ray Tanner and the administration staff spent hours developing protocols after the rug was pulled out from under them in mid-March to make sure teams can not only return but return safely to the play.

So as time ticked down to the start of Friday’s game, emotions were high.

“Everyone was just so ready to go. I mean it’s been 10 months since our last competitive game,” sophomore forward Brian Banahan said. “For a lot of us we’ve been preparing for this moment for a year now. We were just all buzzing to get out there. We were ready to put on a show for everyone that came out.”

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The game was months in the making as the team arrived back on campus July 5 and didn’t look like it would happen this year after the NCAA moved fall championships to the spring.

But the Gamecocks managed to get five games on the schedule this year, starting Friday night and ending Oct. 24 against UAB.

“Being out on the field is who they are. It’s what they want to do,” Berson said. “For us, it’s a wonderful gift and responsibility to represent the university. Our guys were over the moon. They were excited.”

For players, this is normal. Playing soccer is normal and once the emotions of the pregame ended, it was just another soccer game.

And when Frost deked a defender in the 31st minute and slotted the team’s first goal of the year, he wasn’t thinking about his place in program history as the first goal of the 2020 season.

“I was just the lucky one to get on the end of it, honestly,” he said. “There are 10 other players on the field and it found me. I think I was just the lucky one who got on the score sheet.”

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The Gamecocks’ next game is next Thursday at home against Georgia State (7 p.m.) and they’ll begin work on that as soon as possible, but Friday night was about one thing: getting back to sports.

“It’s been crazy. It’s great to see all that pay off tonight with all the hard work and protocols we’ve been following for the last couple months,” Banahan said. “To have that all come together tonight and have a big first win in our first game means a lot to everyone here.”