Zack Bailey’s college experience has been a journey and he’s never left Columbia or changed teams. Instead of moving towns, he packs up his skill set and ventures to different offensive line positions.

Over his first two years at South Carolina he’s played center and guard, and now looks to take down his third position in three years as the starting right tackle. After playing left guard to start his freshman season, Bailey was thrust into the starting center spot when Alan Knott went down with an injury.

Then, as a sophomore, he started every game at left guard before ultimately switching sides of the line entering his junior year.

“Me being a guard and now to tackle, I know the tackle plays but I can get a sense of what my guard’s going to do before he does it. I know how I’m going to treat a block,” he said. “I have that prior knowledge that helps me out.”

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Bailey earned a spot on the SEC’s All-Freshman team for his work as a fill-in center and earned a spot as a team captain three times last year while also shared the team’s Offensive Tenacity Award with Hayden Hurst.

He’s trying to get situated right now at right tackle and will need consistency to beat out Blake Camper to keep his starting spot. Will Muschamp said Bailey could move around to different spots this year to put the team’s best five linemen on the field.

“Zack has a lot of flexibility,” offensive line coach Eric Wolford said. “The thing is you just have to keep pushing Zack. Sometimes he doesn’t have competition exactly at the level it needs to be because of inconsistency in the guys behind him. I have to constantly keep a foot on him and make sure he knows he’s not entitled to anything.”

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Coming into this season, Bailey’s main goal was to get healthy and stronger after battling a wrist injury.

He’s fully healthy this fall and looking to make a big impact, literally. Listed at 6-foot-6, 311 pounds he’s one of the biggest linemen on the team.

“Dealing with that was the biggest thing and trying not to skip a beat,” he said about rehabbing his wrist. “My main focus was going to therapy and doing extra stuff to try and get my wrist back. I’m good to go now, lifting just as well if not better and just trying to be the best I can be. I didn’t skip a step.”

Bailey is still learning the position and, like Wolford said, needs to be more consistent to help lead not only the line, but the offense as a whole. He’s a junior now and part of a relatively experienced offensive line.

He’s picking it up pretty quickly one of his teammates thinks.

“Zack’s been an inside player for us since he’s been here. We flushed him out there to tackle now and it’s a whole new ballgame on the end," Knott said. “I think he’s come the longest route from inside to outside.”

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Bailey is learning a different system under Wolford who was hired after Shawn Elliott left to become the head coach at Georgia State. Wolford wasn’t shy about saying he expects his linemen to do a lot in this offense and focus on the details of playing the position.

That’s still a work in progress for Bailey right now, Wolford said, and consistency is something he’d like to see in practice. But, Bailey is embracing his shift to the right side of the line and the coaching that goes along with it.

“He responds to coaching, he responds to hard coaching and I think he likes it when I yell at him. He really does,” Wolford said, cracking a smile. “I think he likes to see how high he can get my blood pressure. I said, ‘As long as you take care of my kids and family if something bad happens, that’s fine.’”