Aug. 15, 2009

Mother Nature was the winner of Saturday’s scheduled scrimmage for the University of South Carolina football squad, as a 50-minute mid-afternoon downpour left the Williams-Brice Stadium field unplayable. The team will try again to hold a closed scrimmage on Sunday afternoon beginning at 3 p.m. following its appearance at the Colonial Life Fan Appreciation Day, scheduled from 1-2:30 p.m.

“We were out getting ready to scrimmage and a big downpour came,” said head coach Steve Spurrier. “It lasted about an hour (so) we decided to do it tomorrow. We just felt like the players had gotten stiff and we didn’t want to tear up the field too badly, so it made sense to wait and do this tomorrow.”

Coach Spurrier addressed a story that appeared in The State newspaper on Saturday. “The article today about us practicing soft is incorrect. I’ve been a head coach 15 years in college before I came here and we practice physical. We don’t try to hurt our teammates. I’ve been doing that my whole career – for 20 years – trying to protect teammates. We don’t get guys hurt and we’ve pretty successful doing that – a bunch of conference championships. And I can assure our fans we’re practicing here just like our teams did at Florida and our teams did at Duke and everywhere I’ve coached. Players getting hurt in practice is not associated with being physical. It only makes sense to take care of your players in practice and we’re going to do that – we have tough practices.”

After the scrimmage was called off, the squad enjoyed a dinner in the Zone with former Gamecock Lettermen.