Father, son and football: How Shane and Hunter Beamer bond over the sport, coaching

Before there were wireless headsets in college football, there was 11-year-old Shane Beamer.

The brown-haired, bright-eyed boy traded in Saturday cartoons for hours on the Virginia Tech sideline with his dad Frank, trailing the Hokies head coach while dutifully carrying his cord. There in Lane Stadium, and at Murray State before that, was where Shane fell in love with football.

Three decades later, Shane is a head coach himself and has an 11-year-old son of his own: Hunter, the youngest of Shane and Emily Beamer’s three children. Hunter takes after his father. They have the same face and love of the game.

But football isn’t a hobby for them. Nor is it a simple shared passion. It’s Shane’s livelihood. And one of Hunter’s favorite things to talk about with his dad.

The sport is a vehicle for Shane to share life lessons with his son: This is what hard work looks like; this is how you move on from a loss; this is what it means to persevere. For Hunter, it’s a pedestal. A stage that spotlights the trials and triumphs of his dad.

Of his hero.

“His dad hung the moon,” Emily Beamer told The State. “He’s very much proud of who Shane is, not only what he does for a living, but the kind of dad he is.”

Hunter doesn’t patrol the South Carolina sidelines, but he does watch staunchly from the Beamer family box. Superstition rules the room. If you step out to use the bathroom and something good happens, you’re ordered to stay put. Indefinitely.

For years the scoreboard dictated Hunter’s emotions. But now he observes in silence, only breaking it to debrief his mom and two sisters — Sutton, 16, and Olivia, 14 — on the cause of a botched play. He speaks fluent Xs and Os.

“Coaching is in his blood,” Emily said, “because he immediately sees things that the rest of us don’t see.”

Like father, like son

As a child in Blacksburg, Virginia, Shane stood on the second-story deck of his parents’ home with a Fisher-Price walkie-talkie. From there he sent plays to his younger sister Casey, directing her and a number of friends through an elevated game of backyard football.

Shane studied and stored all of Frank’s old playbooks — dating back to his time as defensive coordinator at The Citadel — in his desk drawers. He hand wrote letters to sports information offices around the country asking them to mail him copies of their media guides.

Math and science weren’t his best subjects. But football players’ heights and weights? Shane knew.

Hunter has the internet, nationally broadcast games and “EA Sports College Football 25” to feed his gridiron fix. He’s memorized routes, schemes and game scores like they’re states and capitals. His parents are amazed by his depth of knowledge.

Every Thursday, Hunter asks Shane to go over fake punts or kicks planned for that weekend. Shane inherited “Beamer Ball” from his dad, a hall of fame concept that emphasizes scoring in all three phases. Hunter, it seems, is a third generation special teams enthusiast.

They walk out into the yard, play catch and break down every trick play.

Hunter takes the information and uses it to comb through formations in real time. He scans the field every Saturday for signs something’s afoot. Habits like this are what make Shane think his son might get into coaching.

“I was very much the same way,” Shane said. “Passionate about it. Not just watching it but knowing about it.”

Certainly there are times Shane would rather Hunter didn’t know so much. Like when Shane unknowingly missed his son’s Halloween celebration at school last season. Emily said she figured he’d be busy with practice meetings.

Hunter’s explanation was less compassionate:

“And it’s also because you’re 2-6 and you need to be in the office working.”

Ouch.

Before the Beamers moved to Oklahoma in 2018, Hunter didn’t really like football. He was 4 years old when his dad got the offensive assistant job, and games were just too loud. They left him at home when Shane went to the Rose Bowl with Georgia in 2017.

That changed once they got to Norman. Hunter had Kyler Murray, Baker Mayfield and Jalen Hurts to look up to, plus a bunch of other coaches kids around his age. He decided to play flag football. And Emily would check him out of school early so he could attend OU’s on-campus NFL pro day.

The only flag football league they’ve managed to find around Columbia plays on Saturdays in Lexington. Hunter wouldn’t even consider missing USC game days for his own. (Shane quit football briefly as a child so he wouldn’t have to miss any of his dad’s practices or games either.)

When Texas A&M came to Columbia during the State Fair in 2022, the Beamers got swept up in pregame traffic. It didn’t look like they’d make Gamecock Walk in time. Hunter — who made entering the stadium alongside his dad pregame tradition — was in tears. Emily tried brainstorming ideal drop-off locations so they could run to meet the team buses.

They were too late, but South Carolina defeated Texas A&M 30-24 anyway.

Emily was initially surprised Hunter wanted to be part of Gamecock Walk, where fans line up to enthusiastically greet the team every Saturday. It seemed a stark departure from the shy little boy she knew who shrank himself during his annual “Happy Birthday” serenade. But Hunter persisted out of a desire to support Shane and, of course, superstition.

The highs and lows of dad’s job

Being a coach’s kid requires patience and sacrifice.

When the children were younger, Emily drove them to the facility so they could tell Shane goodnight when his days ran long. Occasionally they’d swing by in the morning with coffee whenever he couldn’t join school drop-off. Every fall they give up countless opportunities to hang out with friends to make all of his games.

Since moving to South Carolina four years ago, though, they’ve encountered a new challenge.

The first thing the Beamer children ask after a loss is if they have to go to school on Monday. A week-and-a-half before last season’s home game versus Clemson, Emily and Shane attended an assembly at Hunter’s school, where a kindergartner heckled Shane and USC’s 4-6 record. Shane joked at his weekly press conference that the little boy must’ve been a Tigers fan.

But Hunter, Sutton and Olivia take those setbacks seriously.

“We have lots of conversations,” Emily said. “People are going to say things, and they’re allowed to say things, and you just have to take it and roll with it.”

Other than Instagram, Emily pretty much quits social media at this point in the year. She and Shane encourage their children to do the same. Online vitriol is just part of the job.

But things aren’t all bad. Celebrating wins is sweet. And sometimes sticky.

When South Carolina played North Carolina in the 2021 Dukes Mayo Bowl, Hunter made his way down to the field early in anticipation of a win. As the clock ticked down to triple zero, Shane picked Hunter up and hugged him tightly. Once the coach put his son down, a wave of green Gatorade washed over them.

“It was a special moment for both of them to be able to do that together,” Emily said.

“... Watching that whole year through Hunter’s eyes was my favorite part.”