Shane Beamer knows fans want him fired. He can live with that. What he cannot accept is seeing those attacks spill onto his teenage daughters. The South Carolina coach got emotional after revealing that a stranger went onto his daughter’s high school Senior Night post just to take a shot at his coaching.
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“It’s a challenge,” Shane Beamer said during his presser, making no excuses for South Carolina’s struggles. “It is what it is. It’s week to week in this league and I know that. Right now 2-3 is not good enough and I own it. That’s on me.”
South Carolina is 2-3, 0-3 in SEC play and coming off a brutal 35-34 overtime loss to Kentucky after blowing a 17-0 lead. The Gamecocks have now lost eight straight SEC games. If fans want to yell “Fire Shane Beamer,” he understands that comes with the territory. But his family, particularly his daughters, are another story.
“But the people I hurt for are my family,” he added. “I feel for the kids because my daughters are a senior in high school and a junior in high school. And let’s be real, they’re on social media, they’re on TikTok, whatever. And it’s not pretty out there. And that’s hard for them to see.”
Shane Beamer can take the heat but his kids shouldn’t have to. He explained that he has stayed away from social media for about three weeks. His daughters, though, are teenagers and still use it. One of them, Sutton, is a high school senior.
Beamer recalled leaving the team hotel before South Carolina’s game against Mississippi State so he could attend her Senior Night ceremony. He had finished a team meeting, left the hotel, and made it back in time to walk onto the field with her.
The school later posted pictures from the evening on Instagram. Then someone used the comments under one of those photos to take a shot at Shane Beamer’s job. That bothered him far more than anything shouted from the stands.
“That’s the part that you’re just like, you know, come on, man,” he said while describing the incident. “I pray for those people if they’ve got that much evil and ugliness in their life that they want to go on the school Instagram page just randomly and found a picture of Shane Beamer’s daughter from senior night and want to make negative comments about her dad. Those are the things that I feel for. I feel for my family. That’s who I hurt for.”
Shane Beamer said his daughters are old enough to see what gets posted online, and that makes those comments particularly difficult. His point was not that he should be immune from criticism. He openly admitted that South Carolina has not been good enough.
“I have not been good enough as a head coach, and I get that,” he said.
Criticizing Shane Beamer is one thing. Going onto his teenage daughter’s Senior Night post just to criticize her father is another. But with South Carolina’s collapse against Kentucky, the pressure on Beamer is only getting worse.
South Carolina jumped ahead 17-0 but could not finish the job. The Gamecocks scored first in overtime, only for the Wildcats to answer with a touchdown and a two-point conversion. That pushed Shane Beamer’s six-year record to 35-33 overall and 16-27 in conference play.
But there is little time to dwell on what happened during the weekend. South Carolina travels to Gainesville this Saturday to face No. 16 Florida before its bye week. The Gamecocks have lost three straight, and another poor showing would only keep the coaching debate alive.