SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS FOOTBALL

When Chad Terrell tore his ACL the spring before his sophomore season, he had a SEC training staff and plenty of advanced medical technology at his fingertips, but he found throughout rehab his biggest resource wasn’t in the training room but right down the hall from the locker room.

As Terrell began his rehab process and went through all the mental peaks and valleys that come with physical therapy he began to lean heavily on a guy who had been through it before in Marcus Lattimore.

“He was a real big influence; he helped me out a lot,” Terrell said. “He stayed in my head and made sure I was thinking about the right things and had the right attitude.”

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Like Terrell, Lattimore tore ligaments in both knees during his time in Columbia, ending early what could have been a prolific college career at South Carolina.

After a brief stint in the NFL and coaching high school football, Will Muschamp brought the Freshman All-American back for a homecoming of sorts to head the Gamecocks’ Beyond Football program.

The program was designed to be a support system for players to prepare them mentally and equip them with skills needed once football is over, and Lattimore presides around Williams-Brice and now the new operations building as a positive reinforcement to players.

It sounds like that worked for Terrell, who used Lattimore’s advice as he began working on the field midseason last year.

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“I always heard from guys like Marcus Lattimore that one of the biggest things that hold people back is being scared to use their knee,” he said. “I told myself I would use it like it was normal, and I did that.”

Terrell tore his ACL in the spring—getting his knee twisted while running a post route in practice—and missed the first half of the 2018 season coming off surgery fighting through a few struggles to return fully healthy.

“The first couple days where you’re really immobile is really hard. It’s hard for you to just take a shower and you can’t put any pressure on your leg,” he said. “It’s hard. Then having to crutch around, it can get to a lot of people. You just have to stay tough and fight through it.”

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He returned to play in three games, preserving his redshirt, not recording a catch and primarily playing on special teams. The redshirt sophomore enters this year ready to work himself into the receiver rotation.

The 6-foot-3, 220-pound receiver’s shown flashes of being really good but needs to stay healthy in order to achieve that. He said he prefers playing outside, saying it’s nice to feel like a deep threat, but as long as he’s in the rotation he won’t complain.

“Whenever the coaches find the best place for me. I don’t really have a specific thing I can think about. I just know I’m coming to work everyday like everyone else and we’ll see where I end up.”