South Carolina is on the hunt for a brand new athletic director after it was introduced throughout a Board of Trustees assembly on Friday that the veteran administrator Ray Tanner plans to step down. Tanner, 66, will transition to an advisory function with the college president as soon as his successor is employed.
“Over the last two weeks, we’ve got had common discussions and conversations with Coach Tanner, the athletics director, and it was his choice to alter the place that he has and capability,” college president Michael Amiridis mentioned, in line with the Huge Spur. “I used to be reluctant to simply accept Ray’s choice due to what he has completed and what he means to the Gamecock group. Ray serves the college with such dignity and devotion and units very excessive requirements in creating student-athletes.”
The previous nationwide title-winning baseball coach has been South Carolina’s athletic director since 2012, overseeing the division via a sequence of monumental modifications in school sports activities. The Gamecocks have risen to energy in ladies’s basketball throughout his tenure by successful three nationwide titles underneath coach Daybreak Staley, who was employed in 2008.
Ends in different main sports activities have been combined underneath Tanner’s route. He employed Will Muschamp to interchange Steve Spurrier in 2015 as South Carolina’s soccer coach, solely to fireside Muschamp and substitute him with Shane Beamer in 2020. In males’s basketball, the Gamecocks made a shock Remaining 4 run in 2017 underneath Frank Martin. However that was this system’s solely NCAA Match look throughout Tanner’s tenure till second-year coach Lamont Paris reached the Huge Dance in 2024.
Tanner served as South Carolina’s baseball coach from 1997 to 2012, main the Gamecocks to back-to-back School World Collection titles in 2010 and 2011 and a runner-up end in 2012 earlier than transitioning to the athletic director function. This system struggled to keep up that normal following his departure from the dugout and has not returned to the School World Collection since.