Everything South Carolina STC Matthew Smiley said in his first press conference of 2026 season

South Carolina special teams coordinator Matthew Smiley spoke with the media for the first time this preseason on Wednesday. Here’s everything he had to say. How is the kicking competition going? “It’s going good. All those guys are working their butts off, and we’re getting up a bunch of reps. So it’s been good to watch all of them compete and grow. It’s been a good competition up to this point.” How would you assess how things went with the kickers in game-like situations when you guys are out there scrimmaging? “We try to put them in as many game-like situations as we can. There are periods where we’re just field goal versus field goal block, and you’re getting just rep after rep after rep. But coach (Shane Beamer) has been great, whether it’s a two-minute drive, different situations where they have to be up and ready. We’ll even sneak them reps between periods when it’s just snapper, holder, kicker run out, just in an effort to get them in front of the team as much as possible and to get them as much of those types of reps as possible. And they’ve been doing a good job with those.” Who are some of the main guys that will factor in on kick return? “We actually did kick return today. Got a lot of good work, and we got a few guys back there catching it, and all those guys looked good today. I checked the film out real quick before I came in here. Got to dive back into that, but there’s three or four guys that are that were back there getting work and look comfortable catching the ball.” Questions about this story? Jack Veltri is discussing it with subscribers on The Insiders Forum. When do you want to have a leader for the kicking competition, or has one already emerged? “I don’t think there’s a timeline. I think kickers are different than if you were figuring out a starting quarterback. We haven’t established, and in talking to coach, there haven’t been conversations of, ‘Hey, this is the date, this is the guy.’ We’re letting those guys compete and really letting it unfold in front of us. And as guys start to say, ‘Hey, this is my job,’ and move ahead, letting that happen naturally.” You mentioned kind of the next step for Vicari Swain was being comfortable catching every ball. Is that something that you’ve seen progress from him so far? “Yeah, he’s doing a great job. Yesterday, we did — we call it ‘sky’ — it’s the short punt situation. So the returners got a lot of that work just with gunners and just him working his decision-making back there, his catching, his all the other stuff we’re talking about, the decoy stuff when I’m fair catching it, he did a great job yesterday. He continues to be real good back there and real comfortable, which is nice. He’s working hard.” Have you in your career experienced something where you guys had multiple kickers that you were trying out using maybe some of the reps of the kicks in season to try to determine who ends up being the one relied upon in a tight game? “Have I ever been involved in a kicker competition? Yes, I have been. Usually in the NFL, it’s two guys; it’s not three guys that are getting some reps, just because your roster is not as big. But definitely been involved with that. You would really not like to use game reps because that means that whoever you sent out there didn’t stay out there. But we’re all about scoring points, so I think, and I’m sure Coach (Shane Beamer) would echo this. At any position, it’s not like, ‘Hey, there’s your starting fill in the blank, and the backup is never going to see the field the whole year.’ So it doesn’t matter who goes out there for the first extra point. The rest of the guys are working their butt off to compete because we’ve got to keep scoring points.” How are things going with the long snapper battle? “Long snappers, short snappers, they’ve been doing a great job. Without getting into too many details about what they got going on in punt, they’ve really embraced both the accuracy of short snapping and long snapping and the coverage aspects in punt, that kind of thing. So those guys have been doing a real good job. And that’s nice to see with those long snappers because sometimes it’s tough when you have a kicker battle if your long snappers are not pulling their weight, because those kickers are on the edge of their seats for every rep. The snappers have done a great job. Mason Love is the holder. They’ve been serving up good snap holds to those kickers as those kickers compete to fight for that spot.” Overall, with the kicking competition, do you feel like things have progressed the way you would have wanted them to when you came into the preseason? “For me, it’s here’s the situation, here’s today. Let’s see how today works out, and then let’s make good decisions for tomorrow. So it sounds a little bit like a cop-out answer, but that’s the truth.” If you had to, would it be a possibility to have one kicker for shorter field goals and one kicker for longer field goals? Would you entertain that? “Definitely entertain it. I think that would have to be a specialized, like that would have to be an interesting situation, because I think if a guy is accurate from, let’s call it, ‘short distances,’ he could probably make that 51-52. Now, when you’re talking about, let’s call them, 56-57, end of half, end of game, now potentially that could be a specialty guy, and then you get into the conversation where what’s the percentage of your specialty guy, let’s call it 59 yards, as opposed to is a Hail Mary as an offensive play better? So yes, definitely a possibility. I don’t know if that’s how it’s going to unfold.” What do you think? Join the discussion on The Insiders Forum.