May is the one month of the year where college football players have their most down time. It comes right after spring practice ends and a few weeks before summer workouts begin. It’s the perfect time to do whatever the heart desires before things ramp back up.
South Carolina redshirt sophomore offensive lineman Cason Henry was ready for the time away from football. He had been working non-stop to rehab from an injury-riddled 2023 season. Being off the clock would probably be good for him.
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Then strength and conditioning coach Luke Day called with new May plans for not just Henry, but the entire offensive line.
“Coach Day literally just told us one day, he was like, ‘Hey, y’all are staying here,'” Henry said. “We were like, ‘What?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to get work.’ I was like, ‘Okay.'”
Instead of spending a few weeks at home, South Carolina’s O-line would be staying in Columbia. They’d essentially take up a part-time residency at the football ops building, where they’d be working to fix some of the issues from last season.
2023 was, to put it lightly, a year to forget for the entire unit. Injuries came every which way, which led to little to no consistency on the line. But the Gamecocks gave up 41 sacks, showing just how big the problems really were.
That’s where the work began: identifying what caused the struggles as a whole. Henry explained that the initial point of the group staying behind was to look at all the plays from last year and see how specific players got hurt, or plays they could’ve gotten injured on.
“Our spring practices, we’d watch games from last year, games from the previous years and stuff like that. Just to get a head start on what we’re going to see,” said sixth-year O-lineman Kamaar Bell .
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When they saw what went wrong, the next move was to see what they could do in the weight room to prevent those injuries from happening again.
“We worked on balance, foot and ankle stuff, knee stuff during that entire month,” said Henry, who went down in the first game of last season with a knee injury. “So we helped mitigate injuries, and I think it’s really shown up because we haven’t had, knock on wood, any serious injuries during fall camp — and that was not the case last year. We had a ton of guys in RTP last year, and we haven’t really had any of that this year. So I think the strength staff really hit the nail on the head with that one where we kind of got that taken care of.”
Injuries played a big role in many of the issues from a year ago. But the month of May was also about getting better as a unit. Again, injuries were only one part of the equation. South Carolina couldn’t block well up front to protect its quarterback, or do much to open up the run game.
Many would argue the O-line has the most to prove while in search of a bounce back year. It was a lot of hard work and time put in that could’ve been spent elsewhere. But the players stuck with it the entire way through.
“We was up here every day non-stop just doing extra work, going through our steps, going through our pass sets, all of that,” Bell said. “Getting in the meeting room and just watching over things that we did in the spring. Just stuff like that.”
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Added Henry: “We spent a lot of time together when nobody else was here but us. We worked with Coach Day, personally, Coach Chip (Morton), personally. All of the strength staff were great during that month. We would come in, we would get work, we would get OL work with Coach (Lonnie) Teasley and our GAs Roger and (John Rudnicki). It was just a great time overall that we’re doing something no one else is doing. Everybody’s on break and it made us feel like a sense of importance, like this is important, this is going to help us, and the strength staff really communicated that to us like, ‘This is really, really going to help you guys.’ I thought it was a great time for us, and I thought it was really necessary.”
It’s been a few months since then, and so far, things have been going well for the O-line. Henry, who’s been with the program since 2022, has seen notable differences in the way they go about their business. It’s no longer a doom and gloom feeling like last year. There’s an “eagerness” about this season and being able to turn things around.
“When I came in my freshman year, we had guys that were kind of reluctant where they were like, ‘I’m not going to play. I don’t really want to learn all this. I don’t want to give my all in meetings,'” he said. “Everybody wants to play, everybody wants to learn, everybody wants to succeed. We’re all one unit and I think we’re meshed way better than we have been in the past couple years, and you see it come on the field. We run the run the ball a lot better because our combos are better. We play better together. And I think it’s helped us a lot to match together and have better interpersonal relationships than we have in the past.”
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