Jalon Kilgore has always been running.

Running on the track from an early age. Running up and down the basketball court. Running with the ball as a wildcat quarterback at Putnam County High School. Running to the ball as an immediate starter on South Carolina’s defense, already tied for the team lead in tackles after two games.

Running in places you would never imagine someone running.

“One day in his sophomore year it was pouring down rain,” Kilgore’s high school head coach Shaun Pope told GamecockScoop. “I leave school to go home and was riding through town, and someone was running down the street. I got closer and closer and said, ‘Oh, that’s Jalon!’ He was out conditioning in a rainstorm when everyone else was sitting inside.”

The situation sounds crazy on surface. A true freshman comes in after a starter gets hurt on the first drive of the season, plays the entire game in week one, and starts the following week. Not only does he survive, he adjusts seamlessly.

It feels normal in Columbia after nearly an identical situation occurred last year with safety Nick Emmanwori, who Kilgore ironically replaced this time. But there is nothing ordinary about 18 tackles in two games for a safety, let alone a true freshman.

“The guys who are physically ready to play, those are the ones you have to just throw out there,” defensive coordinator Clayton White said. “He did a lot of lifting, a lot of stuff in his high school where he was physically ready to play. From an IQ standpoint they’re grinding at it, but to me he is physically able to tackle another human being by himself. That makes him very easy to play early.”

Tackling is a declaration of no fear. It is throwing your body in front of another player, almost always an older, more experienced one in Kilgore’s case. At safety, it usually requires meeting someone who has already built up a head of speed at the point of contact.

Throwing caution to the wind and seeking contact as an 18-year-old college football player is as much about mentality as technique.

It comes naturally.

“That’s what we built in him,” Kilgore’s father, James Kilgore Sr., told GamecockScoop. “Once everybody would leave, we would still be on the field. There were nights that we were doing baseball practice where there was nobody out there but myself, [Jalon’s brother] Gerald and Jalon and we were practicing pop flys. Nobody else was out there, they’re just out there catching balls, catching balls, catching balls. There were so many days like that.”

A 12-year-old Kilgore was in the same building as NBA MVP James Harden and retired six-time All-Star Jermaine O’Neal. His trip took him from Eatonton, Ga. — a town of just over 6,000 residents as of the last census — to Houston. He was not there for a vacation and did not happen to be in an arena with Harden for a Houston Rockets game.

The exact opposite.

Harden was watching Kilgore play.

As a player on DCA, Dream Chasers Academy, Kilgore was an exceptional AAU basketball player. It meant traveling for tournaments, and a big one in Houston included teams organized by Harden and O’Neal involved. Even Bronny James — you might be familiar with his father — lined up against Kilgore’s team.

“Their whole entourage and security and all that was with him,” Kilgore Sr. remembered. “You saw when Bronny would go from one place to the next, he had the guards with him and everything.”

So what did the future South Carolina player do with professional eyes on him and arguably the greatest athlete of all time’s son bringing the ball up the court against him?

The same thing he did four years prior when he won a 100-meter National Championship in track for his age group, with the same abilities he showed when he pulled off a 23 foot-7 inch long jump in high school.

No fear. No backing down. Always running towards action.

“Jalon went out there and stole the ball from him once or twice,” James said. “He didn’t care. ‘I know he’s supposed to be this guy or whatever, but I’ve been built for this. Let’s play.’”

As fast as Kilgore wants to go, every gas pedal needs its brake.

Running all the time is only possible with muscle memory, an innate technical understanding everyone agrees is beyond his years.

“The game is slowing down for him,” cornerback Marcellas Dial said. “Everything is coming along. He’s been doing really good, stepping up.”

One of Pope’s off-season staples in his program was incorporating the rising ninth-graders working with the rest of the high school team in the spring and summer, doing early conditioning and practice work. Kilgore’s role became helping those players with so many firsts, whether a specific practice drill or skill.

“He’s a student,” Pope said. “He studies whatever it is, it doesn’t matter what position or what sport it is. He’s going to study it and be the very best he can be at it. Obviously he is blessed with a lot of talent, but there’s a lot of guys that have a lot of talent. But he works at it, he studies, he wants to be the very best at his position. That’s just who he is.”

Off the football field, he is a “homebody” as his dad describes him, a quieter person who loves fishing and spent basketball game days in his dorm room instead of Colonial Life Arena once he got on campus.

It is not shyness, and certainly not an unwillingness to seek action. It is the necessary side piece to running all the time — re-charging. If the breakneck career trajectory seems like a lot, the carefully calculated downtime between everything fuels it.

A grueling week of high school practice culminated with a Friday night game. On Saturdays, instead of going out to parties or watching football, he worked concession stands at Sanford Stadium to raise money for a non-profit organization with the church. He technically ran on Sundays, but it was running the cameras and sound system at his father’s church.

Four-sport athlete. Sell burgers. Dial up a camera. Back to being a four-sport athlete. Just like that, seamlessly moving between gas and brake.

“That’s him,” James said. “He’s quiet. He’ll talk some, but he’s more to himself.”

Saturday afternoon, Kilgore will play in the stadium he used to work in. Eatonton will have a cheering section Between the Hedges. Pope — a Georgia fan — has a front-row ticket.

Nobody in his circle is surprised about this start. But even with the expectation, it has still been a blur. Less than two weeks ago, he had zero collegiate snaps. Now he is playing so much, his father had to issue a “no barking” rule for his church squarely in the middle of a Bulldog-obsessed community.

“It’s just a surreal situation,” James said. “We knew that he had the potential, we always knew he would do well, but we never knew it would happen that fast. That was the whole thing. The speed of everything happening right now has the whole family in awe.”

Like everything else for the Kilgores, it happened fast.

Must be all the running.

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