South Carolina searched far and wide to find the perfect goggles for LaNorris Sellers

Clint Haggard figured LaNorris Sellers would be happy to ditch the goggles.

When the Gamecocks’ starting quarterback arrived on campus last season, Haggard — South Carolina’s head football athletic trainer since 2009 — told Sellers there was no need to continue playing with the Rec Specs that he had donned at South Florence High.

“You’re gonna wear contacts,” Haggard told Sellers. “We’ll just put a shield over your facemask and that way no one can poke you in the eye.”

There was one problem: Sellers hates contacts.

Sellers had once thought about contacts, but his parents vetoed the idea. Cheryl Ford, Sellers’ mom, knows her boy. He’s too carefree for contacts. She could picture it in her head, Sellers shoving his hand into a bag of sunflower seeds and then fidgeting with his contact, smearing his eye with salt and dirt and germs and who knows what else.

“Well,” Sellers told his mom, “you can help me.”

“I will do anything for you,” Ford told him, “but I’m not playing around with your eyeball. I’m not doing it.”

For a while, Sellers was able to play football without anything over his eyes. During his freshman season at South Florence, his dad Norris asked him if he was seeing his teammates OK on the field. The response didn’t inspire any confidence.

“Yeah,” Sellers told his dad, “I can see glimpses of their jerseys.”

As a sophomore, Sellers just wore his normal glasses but put a string on the temples so they wouldn’t fall on the turf and get stomped on. But those were moving too much and, surely, it was only a matter of time before they were destroyed.

Which led the Sellers family to LensCrafters inside the Magnolia Mall in Florence. There was a limited selection of sport goggles, but Sellers just picked the one he liked best — some off-brand, black Rec Specs.

He wore them throughout his final two seasons of high school. When two defensive linemen scrunched him as a junior, pushing a bone just over his heart and ending his season, he was wearing the goggles. When he led the Bruins to an undefeated season as a senior, lifting the state championship trophy in his final high school game, he was wearing the goggles.

“People started noticing like, ‘This is y’all’s quarterback and he wears glasses. That’s a joke right?’ ” Ford said. “Then you saw him play and it was like, ‘Whoa.” … he was literally known as the quarterback with goggles.”

Sellers’ parents disagreed on if it was one or two pairs that got Sellers through high school. Either way, by the time Sellers got to South Carolina he had just one pair — goggles so worn down that Haggard had no clue what brand or size they were.

And one pair wasn’t going to work. So Sellers brought his goggles to Haggard and the 15-year athletic trainer began an internet quest, hunting for the exact pair of goggles Sellers had handed him.

“You’re literally sitting there,” Haggard said, “looking online on this website, trying to match up what they are.”

After a while, Haggard thought he had a match. He scanned Sellers’ prescription from Sansbury Eye Center, uploaded it and waited. When the package arrived, Haggard told Sellers to come by his office and make sure they were right. Sellers brought his original pair. Haggard opened the box. Immediately, both of them knew it wasn’t right.

“They were just shaped slightly different, but you couldn’t tell online,” Haggard said. “He’s a really good guy, so he’s gonna sit there and try it out. So he put them on and he was like, ‘Eh, they just feel a little different.’ ”

So Haggard hopped back to OpticsOutfitter.com, finding the pair he almost picked the first time.

There it was. The Challenger XL. The goggles of LaNorris Sellers.

The Challenger XL is one of the few pairs on the website with zero reviews, but the description touts they are for the XL eye size (60mm), come with an adjustable strap (which Sellers uses) and includes phrases such as “New Temple Padding,” “Over-mold and Sculpted Temple” and “Patented Eye-Rim Assembly.”

Haggard bought a pair of the Challenger XL Rec Specs. They were an exact match. Haggard was probably more excited than Sellers — and to ensure there are backups Haggard purchased four more pairs.

“When we travel on the road, we’ve got two extra pairs with us,” Haggard said. “Everybody who has contacts on the whole team, we have a kit where we have extra contacts. For him, we’ve got glasses instead of contacts.”

Adding in the extra $75 for the Rec Specs to come with prescription lenses, each pair of Challenger XLs retails for $249.95 — meaning South Carolina spent nearly $1,250 on Sellers.

The amount of fan excitement those goggles have generated, of logos it has spawned and of the notoriety they have brought to both South Carolina and Sellers might be worth 10 times the investment.

Even if folks don’t yet know the name of South Carolina’s new starting quarterback, they know what he wears.

South Carolina vs. ODU game this week

Who: South Carolina vs. Old Dominion

Where: Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, SC

When: 4:15 p.m. Saturday

TV: SEC Network

Stream: via the ESPN app

Series history: Saturday will be the first football game played between these two programs.

Odds: USC by 20.5