SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS FOOTBALL

If there’s one word to sum up South Carolina’s biggest weakness the last two seasons, it’s injuries.

Injuries marred and stunted any sort of consistency—in 2018 it was on the defensive side of the ball before making its way over to the offense in 2019—and it’s one of the reasons the Gamecocks were in the market for a new strength coach this offseason.

Will Muschamp landed on Paul Jackson to head up the strength program with one of the biggest priorities being to cut down on the bevy of injuries taking their toll on the football program.

“Coach and I talked a little bit. I feel like you have to have exposure throughout the entire year to fast-speed sprinting to limit some soft tissue injuries,” Jackson said. “You can’t get away from it for extended periods of time then think you can ask (guys) to go redline during the season or at any point and you’re not prepared for it. So we’ll have micro-doses of that throughout the year.”

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The Gamecocks saw plenty of starting defensive players go down in 2018—a lot in the game against Ole Miss, Jackson’s former employer—before Jake Bentley went down for the year in the season-opener, Bryan Edwards dealt with a knee injury that kept him out the final two weeks of the year, Shi Smith battled soft tissue issues and the Gamecocks only had one of two primary starters—Tavien Feaster and Rico Dowdle—healthy for long stretches of the year.

As Jackson comes in and starts to acquaint himself with this year’s group, he’ll start determining which players are at a greater risk for injuries than others.

“The greatest predictor of future injuries is previous injuries. You have to look at that. You have to take a look at their habits outside of here,” he said. “Kids have to take some ownership of that. It’s about educating them and driving home the importance of nutrition, hydration, sleep, hygiene, all those things are going to be critical.”

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He’ll have plenty of tools to work with as he begins his offseason regiment Monday, most notably the Catapult system.

Catapult allows coaches to monitor every player’s vitals during workouts to determine which guys are exerting maximum effort but also uses it for injury prevention to see which vitals are dipping over the course of the session.

“Let’s utilize the catapult and monitoring systems we have and coming up with new ideas and looking at the acute to chronic straining stressors and being able to bring some new ideas to that,” he said.

South Carolina starts the winter workout program Monday and will go for a little less than two months before the start of spring practice at the end of February.

Jackson said the key to it would be a four-day a week sprint training, which emphasizes speed and traditional conditioning days.

He said that program goes in reverse order with speed days starting with higher-intensity runs and going to slower, more conditioning-like runs while the conditioning side of things starts slower and gets faster as it gets closer to spring ball.

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“As you get closer to football, those two days start to look similar. Then conditioning sessions start to look like they’re running fast on those days as well as they are as well. Then progressing that way,” Jackson said. “Then you start introducing more change of direction, more cutting because you don’t want them to go into football more straight-line running. Some of our conditioning days will transition into more change of direction being it gassers or be it shuttle type conditioning sessions.”