How FCS life shaped South Carolina's coaching staff

Greg Adkins was part of a fully operational powerhouse at Marshall from 1991-1995.

The Thundering Herd won the FCS National Championship in 1992 and made it to at least the semifinals all five years he was in the program.

In addition to coaching line players on both sides and tight ends, he also became a lawn care expert. It was his job to water the practice field in Huntington for Jim Donnan’s team.

Even the cream of the FCS crop could not afford a sprinkler system.

“At that time I was doing it, I was doing it for the love of the game,” Adkins said about his coaching roots. “It wasn’t for the money, for sure. My first salary was $12,000, and I think I ended up somewhere around $24,000-$26,000 by the time I finished up at Marshall.”

Adkins — who was South Carolina's offensive line coach before stepping away from the team due to health reasons on Thursday — was part of a staff that has been molded by coaching at the FCS level. The three coordinators combined for 35 years coaching at FCS programs, and two out of three played their football at one. Defensive line coach Jimmy Lindsey worked on staff at four different FCS schools across 14 years, including his alma mater Chattanooga. Jody Wright, Montario Hardesty, and Torrian Gray all coached at FCS before eventually jumping to the top level of college football and crossing paths in Columbia.

It is a type of coaching entirely foreign to the highest rungs of the college football ladder. Smaller support staffs. Stretched responsibilities. Agonizing decisions over how to break up scholarships to fill out roster depth due to FCS teams only having 63 full scholarships compared to the 85 FBS teams get. Extended bus rides through remote parts of America.

“The amount that falls back on the coaches at that level is tremendous,” Lembo said. “When I was an FCS head coach at Lehigh, we didn’t have an ops [operations] guy. So one coach would be responsible for team travel, and another coach was the recruiting coordinator and another coach handled the camps. You had another coach who would be responsible for academics. At Lehigh, we didn’t even have a full-time strength coach when I was there.”

More than anyone else, Lembo can speak about this grind. He spent a decade as an FCS head coach, five years at Lehigh and five at Elon before FBS Ball State hired him in 2011. Those long nights trying to piece every part of a football program are in stark contrast to his current SEC life, where South Carolina has entire departments handling things his old jobs did not even have individuals working through.

In Columbia, his players have a precise nutrition regimen crafted to maximize bodily growth and performance.

At Lehigh, after a 37-7 playoff win at Western Illinois, the team ate day-old tinfoil-wrapped cheeseburgers on the plane as the postgame meal.

“I truly believe it helps you grow as a coach, and it helps you appreciate the profession,” Lindsey said. “If you’re fortunate enough to move up, it makes you appreciate it even more. You look at it and say, ‘man, I came a long way.’”

When Jimmy Lindsey coached at Gardner-Webb from 2003-2006, one of his responsibilities was working as the team’s equipment manager. Sometimes this meant meetings with Adidas representatives to figure out what his players and fellow coaches could feasibly wear on a Saturday. During some weeks, it meant actually doing the laundry for his team himself in the basement of the football building.

His FCS life has taken him through a litany of experiences. As a defensive line coach at Chattanooga in 2010, the Mocs had a non-conference game scheduled against an FBS opponent. But this was no ordinary opponent. It was Auburn, and Lindsey had the task of preparing his defense to face Cam Newton in the middle of arguably the greatest individual season in college football history.

Auburn scored 48 points in the first half. Newton set a new career-high in passing yards.

“For me it was a great experience,” Lindsey said about his time in FCS. “I think that’s where I grew as a coach the most, just from a coaching on the field standpoint, and then getting things done off the field with whatever administrative duties the head coach gave you. I think that’s where a young coach can cut his teeth and sort of find what his coaching style is and all of those things, and you grow from there.”

Each memory is a brick in the wall that now forms South Carolina’s collective coaching wisdom. Those little anecdotes stick with the coaches, even as their Rolodexes have collected hundreds of games and thousands of weeks of work since then. Each FCS school has similar hurdles to its FBS counterparts, but no two places are exactly alike.

Lembo’s big FCS-over-FBS upset was a 37-26 scalp at Buffalo in 2002. The game was a Thursday night, and he recalled “having to get the blessing,” of university administrators to miss two days of class for the 12-hour round-trip bus ride.

He needed permission to travel to his own grand triumph.

For Adkins, just raising enough money to avoid one of those bus rides was a core memory of his 1991 trip to Furman. Marshall and Furman were both ranked in the top 15 of the FCS poll for an early season showdown, and the athletic department squeaked out enough cash to charter a flight from Huntington to Greenville. Marshall won a 38-35 thriller, a statement game that springboarded the Thundering Herd on a run to the FCS National Championship Game.

“I think you probably have a little bit greater appreciation when you’ve worked yourself up through the ranks,” Adkins said. “When you are at a place like South Carolina, you do appreciate all the little things that are available to you.”

FCS coaching is a lifestyle. For some, it is a pit stop early in a long coaching career at higher levels. Jody Wright spent one year at Jacksonville State in 2013 and worked his way onto Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama and then into the NFL before Shane Beamer hired him to coach the tight ends. For others, it's a lifelong venture. The FCS head coach Beamer and the Gamecocks hosted on Thursday, South Carolina State’s Buddy Pough, is in his 19th season as head coach in Orangeburg.

It is a process as much about teaching kids how to become better football players as it is teaching yourself how to coach. On-the-job training in more ways than just installing a blocking scheme or overseeing a practice drill. But there is one thing everyone in Columbia agrees on: if you want to become a better coach, you start by working at FCS programs.

“You don’t forget where you came from, and that’s something I’m grateful for,” Lembo said. “I think every coach should have an opportunity to coach at that FCS level because it’s real coaching. It forces you to do more with less. It forces you to be really organized with your time and become a really well-rounded coach. I think it’s great preparation for being a head coach someday.”