Josh Vann focused on improvement before one last ride with Gamecocks
Everything South Carolina football’s Josh Vann had been working toward finally came to fruition last season.
The former four-star recruit from Tucker, Ga. broke out with a career year, catching 43 passes for 679 yards as the team’s clear top wide receiver.
Now, Vann is back for more, hoping to build off that season and have an even more productive 2022 campaign to increase his NFL Draft stock.
“Definitely just becoming a better player,” Vann told Gamecock Central in an exclusive Garnet Trust interview, speaking on his goals for the recently completed spring practice. “Obviously, the past is the past. What I did last season, it happened, so I’m very thankful for all the opportunities I got. But, it’s never a day off.”
Vann, who spent the early years of his career in the shadows of current NFLers like Deebo Samuel and Bryan Edwards, relished his opportunity to be the Gamecocks’ top target last season.
But he hasn’t rested on those accomplishments.
Wide receivers coach Justin Stepp complimented Vann during the spring for his improved route-running and Vann says he’s been deliberate about putting last season behind him to focus on the future.
“With all the new talent coming in, just by me even having that mindset, like, ‘Oh, I got it in the bag,’ like, ‘I don’t need to do anything, I don’t need to improve anything,’ I could have definitely went downhill. So definitely, just pretty much everything: tuning routes, getting my depth in my route running,” Vann said. “Every day I just told myself, just try to find something to work on every day, whether it be running off the field, because coaches watch everything, route running, like I said, getting my depth, bringing the young guys along, the new guys, and just pretty much being an all-around person. That was pretty much my goal for the spring.”
As a “Super Senior” now, this is Vann’s receiver room but it’s also a much deeper and overall more talented group than the one he was featured in last season.
In the short term, that means more day-to-day competition for No. 6, whether it be in the form of transfer newcomer Antwane Wells Jr., former transfer Ahmarean Brown, who found his footing late last season, or Xavier Legette, who appears ready to emerge in his own right.
In the long term, it means a much more complete arsenal of weapons for the South Carolina offense and potentially the inability for defenses to key on any one player.
“There’s so much competition in the room now,” Vann said. “Definitely last year, the talk around USC was, who (are) the receivers? We had Deebo, Bryan and Shi Smith. And it was like, who’s gonna be next? And we didn’t know. So you know, it all (was) determined by the season last year. But definitely, you look around and you see like three, four or five guys, that can get the job done too. And that really just takes the spotlight off me. It won’t take the spotlight off me. I really don’t care, but definitely being able to have guys that can get the job done and being able to spread the ball around instead of just one guy. It can be a tough offense.”
Now that spring practice is over, Vann and the rest of the South Carolina football team get one month off — really the only month of the entire calendar year that they get off from team activities — before returning to action for summer workouts in June and then kicking it into another gear in August.
Vann hopes to walk that fine line between giving himself a mental and physical break to recuperate while also remaining focused on the main goal.
“You don’t want to take any time off,” Vann said. “(But) you want to get away from football just because, like I said, we’ve been working since September (with) no breaks and we get one month off. So you want to step back from football and just breathe and relax and just let it all come out your mind. But at the same time, you still want to be out there conditioning, working out, doing some type of football stuff. But I know for me myself, I gotta get the job done, you know, I got different priorities that I got to put in front of myself other than just to relax and take time off.”
