Why Shane Beamer went ‘back and forth’ deciding to let Gilber Edmond back on the team
What started as a moral quandary turned into a recruiting pitch.
During a Friday afternoon news conference to introduce new wide receivers coach James Coley and running backs coach Marquel Blackwell, coach Shane Beamer was asked about one of South Carolina’s 20 transfer portal additions.
Outside of Arkansas transfer tailback Raheim “Rocket” Sanders, perhaps none of USC’s portal hauls was as interesting as edge rusher Gilber Edmond.
Recruited by Will Muschamp, Edmond was at South Carolina from 2020 and worked his way to a starting role, racking up 39 tackles in a productive redshirt sophomore season.
After that year, Edmond hit the transfer portal and signed with Florida State.
He played sparingly for an undefeated Seminoles squad and might have been a starter next season.
Instead, he wanted a chance to play for South Carolina again.
The process of him wanting to return to Columbia and Beamer debating whether he would allow Edmond to return to the Gamecocks’ locker room became a five-minute verbal odyssey Friday.
Beamer said he got word two weeks ago that Edmond wanted to come back into the program, forcing him to wrestle with a decision most coaches never have to make.
“I thought a lot about it and went back and forth, to be honest with you,” Beamer said. “There’s some guys, I’ll be completely honest, who have left the program and if they called and said they wanted to come back to the program, it would be a ‘heck no’ pretty quickly. That wasn’t the case with Gilber.”
Edmond, Beamer said, left on the best terms a player entering the transfer portal could. That doesn’t mean flowers and hugs. But Beamer understood some of the reasons — including the fact that Edmond’s parents are in their 70s — that living in Florida and playing at FSU would make it easier for them to watch him.
Now that’s not to say name, image and likeness (NIL) didn’t play a part in the decision.
“NIL, I’m sure, was involved,” Beamer said. “[But] he handled it the right way when he left. Was I ticked off when he left? Yes. Was I disappointed he left? Yes. Was I happy? Not at all. But he handled it the right way and I understood the reasons why.”
When he learned of Edmond’s interest in a return to the garnet and black, Beamer did not jump at the opportunity. He did his due diligence.
There were conversations with Edmond himself. Talks with some of the Gamecocks’ players, gauging whether they would welcome Edmond back. There were chats with the coaches who had been abandoned by Edmond a year ago.
Even after all that, Beamer wanted to make a return about as appealing as a bus ride to Sacramento. There would be few frills. “There’s going to be guys in that locker room that are mad that you left and it’s going to take some time to rebuild that trust with them,” Beamer told him.
The No. 8 Edmond wore when he was at USC? That now belongs to Emory Floyd and he’s not giving it up. Edmond was fine with No. 55, the number given to him when he arrived as a freshman.
“I want to come back and finish what I started,” Edmond told Beamer.
The Gamecocks’ head coach talked about how the edge room is a shell of the one Edmond left. The familiar faces are gone.
And the NIL money?
“I said, ‘I don’t know what you were making from an NIL standpoint at Florida State, but you ain’t getting anything remotely close to that here,’ ” Beamer said. “If you’re coming back here, it’s not for NIL reasons.”
Edmond accepted it all. All for the chance to return to South Carolina — which is how Beamer spins this narrative into a recruiting sales pitch. And a darn good one.
“It makes a helluva statement about our program. A helluva statement about our program,” Beamer said. “You hear a lot of these guys leave for different reasons and they want to go home — he went home.
“He went home to the state of Florida. He went undefeated. He won a conference championship. And all that wasn’t enough. He said, ‘I want to come back to Columbia, South Carolina because I realize now that the grass isn’t always greener.’ ”
