Dec. 16, 2005

South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier met with the media Friday afternoon and announced the hiring of two new assistant coaches, Fred Chatham and Robert Gillespie.

“We are here today to announce two new assistant coaches that will be coming in. To replace Rick Stockstill, as our tight end coach, Fred Chatham, coached with me at Duke University and he has been there ever since.

“To tell you what kind of person he is, he survived five coaches at Duke. He’s a wonderful guy, has been a good friend and a good coach. I’ve watched him coach and he’s remained a pretty good contact over all these years. He was there when we won the (ACC) championship in 1989 and it just worked out perfectly the position he coaches is available here. We feel fortunate to get him to come. He’s been there 17 seasons and we got him down here in South Carolina now.”

“Running backs coach, I felt like we had the best guy right here I could have hired. Obviously, if Robert Gillespie would have had his degree maybe a year ago, he would have been the guy to hire at the time. Robert has played in our offense approximately five years. He spent a little bit of time up there with the Redskins in the NFL and he played a little bit in NFL Europe. He knows our offense about as well as anyone I could hire and I wanted a young coach who could get out there and run with them and throw with them and so forth. Robert does that. He doesn’t have a lot of experience coaching but he has a lot of experience in our offense. So I felt he was very qualified to step up and be a full-time coach.”

“We are looking forward to practice for the bowl game starting tomorrow. The guys are coming into tonight. We will have a team meeting tonight, watch a little tape on Missouri and start practicing tomorrow. Scheduled for two practices tomorrow and one Sunday afternoon. We will practice through Wednesday morning and the players head home for Christmas and return the night of Christmas. We will practice the morning of the 26th and fly to Shreveport that day.”

“Right now (John Thompson) is on a leave of absence. He’s not going to coach the bowl game. He is still officially listed as one of our coaches.”