How Pete Lembo became the face of South Carolina football's Beamer Ball 2.0

COLUMBIA — When Pete Lembo began his career in college football, his goal was to lead an Ivy League program. The lifelong Northerner never imagined himself at a Midwest school like Ball State, much less in the SEC.

"My dream was to be a head coach," Lembo said. "Whether that was a small Division III school where I could go be there for 30 years or maybe an Ivy League school if I could work my way up to a place like that. But your career takes different twists and turns."

In 2023, Lembo is neither a head coach nor in the Ivy League, but he is arguably the most prominent member of South Carolina football's staff behind coach Shane Beamer. Under the son of special teams legend Frank Beamer, the special teams coordinator has earned national recognition as the architect of an elite unit, affectionately nicknamed Beamer Ball 2.0.

How New York roots shaped Pete Lembo's career

After graduating from Georgetown in 1992, Lembo immediately faced an uphill battle to get into coaching. The NCAA reduced the number of graduate assistants for football programs from five to two that year, meaning Lembo was entering a heavily saturated job market with no major playing accolades or coaching experience.

"There were hundreds of GAs whose jobs had been eliminated, and they were scrambling for work. So many of them were just trying to get another grad assistant job to stay in it," Lembo said. "And I was coming out of a Division III small-college program, so I had really two strikes against me in terms of trying to get my foot in the door."

He found an opening partly thanks to his father, a New York City police officer from Staten Island. Pete Lembo Sr. often worked security for football and basketball games at Wagner College in his spare time, so Lembo got to know several assistants there that had come from coach Bob Ford's staff at Albany. When he reached out to those connections after graduating, several recommended the program as a starting point.

"At Albany, the head coach, offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator were the only full time coaches, so the rest of the staff was pretty much crowd assistants," Lembo said. "So right away as a 22-year-old coach, I was getting a chance to go on the road recruiting. I was getting a chance to coach a position. I had a lot of responsibilities that usually would go to full-time coaches at bigger programs."

Ford, who retired in 2013 after 43 years coaching the Great Danes, has an expansive coaching tree that includes former Dallas Cowboys coach Dave Campo and longtime NFL offensive line coach Tony Wise.

"Coach Ford enjoyed developing coaches as much, maybe even more than he enjoyed developing student-athletes," Lembo said. "He was very demanding of us, but he was very much a mentor, and he took great pride in you maximizing your two years with him and then you moving on to bigger and better things."

Pete Lembo's rapid rise to head coaching

Lembo spent two seasons coaching tight ends at Dartmouth and one as offensive coordinator at Division III Hampden-Sydney before he was hired as the offensive line coach at Lehigh in 1998. There he found another mentor in coach Kevin Higgins, who later served as an assistant for the Detroit Lions before returning to the college ranks. He is now general manager for Wake Forest under coach Dave Clawson, another former member of Ford's Albany staff.

Higgins immediately recognized head coaching potential in Lembo and elevated the 28-year-old to assistant head coach and recruiting coordinator. He had no hesitation recommending Lembo for his own job two years later when he left for the Lions.

"I made him feel my assistant head coach because I trusted him doing things that perhaps I wasn't able to do," Higgins said. "Like Pete did a great job for me with our admissions office, and in order to deal with the head of admissions, the person's got to carry themselves well. They've got to be smart. They've got to be able to make decisions."

"I gave him small responsibilities and just kept giving them, and when you can keep feeding somebody responsibilities and they do a good job with it, you have that sense that this guy is going to be able to make the leap to the next level."

Lembo was one of the youngest head coaches in Division I when he took over at Lehigh in 2001. He remains the winningest coach in program history by percentage, leading Lehigh to a 44-14 record over five seasons. The Mountain Hawks completed an undefeated regular season in Lembo's first year and won two Patriot League championships during his tenure.

Penn defensive coordinator Bob Benson still remembers a 69-0 loss to Lehigh when he was coach at Georgetown in 2002. For Benson, yet another former Albany assistant, it wasn't a surprise to see Lembo succeed so quickly.

"I always thought his offenses were just impossible to defend," Benson said. "I'm embarrassed to say the first year we went to Lehigh, they might have beat us 70-7. It wasn't close ... He really thrived under Bob Ford, and it didn't take long for people to realize he was a rising star."

How Pete Lembo fell in love with special teams

Lembo didn't hold his first special teams coordinator job until 2017 and viewed himself primarily as an offensive mind until he was hired as coach of Elon in 2006. It was a rebuilding job after the Phoenix went 3-8 in 2004 and 2005, which forced Lembo to spend most of his time on endeavors outside of the actual football.

Lembo's joy always came from working directly with players, but external demands at Elon and later Ball State didn't allow him to be in offensive meetings day-to-day. Spending time with special teams allowed him to stay involved while interacting with players across all position groups.

"When you're trying to raise money to build facilities and trying to develop a rapport with the community in hopes that some people actually come to games, I was getting pulled away more and more from contributing to the offensive game plan," Lembo said. "What I found was that the special teams, while it did change week-to-week, the core was going to be constant, so that was an area where I could still hands-on coach every day."

Elon coach Tony Trisciani was Lembo's special teams coordinator for the Phoenix in 2006 and said the brilliance of his play designs is rooted in how effectively he communicates them.

"He has the ability to make things simple enough for his players so that the scheme can be sound, and they can play fast," Trisciani said. "They're not paralyzed by assignment. You can draw a lot of lines and crazy schemes on special teams, or you can keep it sound and simple. He's able to change up looks for people but keep it simple for his guys."

Lembo's proclivity for special teams helped him make the jump into the Power Five as special teams coordinator at Maryland. He held the same role for a year at Rice and two at Memphis before joining Beamer's staff at South Carolina.

"As hard as Maryland was, it really forced me out of my comfort zone for two years and forced me to rethink and revamp a lot of what I was doing," Lembo said. "At age 45, it was almost like going and getting a PhD, plus you didn't have the same kind of personnel as Michigan or Ohio State. That's been a common theme for me almost every step along the way where I've been in jobs where I've had to do more with less."

KAI KROEGER: How South Carolina football's Kai Kroeger used summer golf to develop punting technique

With the Gamecocks, Lembo is showing what he can do with an SEC program at his disposal. In 2022, South Carolina finished No. 2 in the nation in blocked punts, No. 3 in blocked kicks and punt returns and No. 6 in kickoff returns. He has also developed a reputation for trick plays, giving punter Kai Kroeger two passing touchdowns last season.

Still, Lembo will always feel the influence of his small school roots. He noticed it even in preparing South Carolina (1-0) for its matchup Saturday (7:30 p.m., ESPN+) against Furman (1-0), remembering when the Paladins beat his Lehigh team in the 2001 Division I-AA playoffs.

"You never forget where you came from, and it makes you extremely grateful to walk into this building every day and have the kind of resources that we have," Lembo said. "I remember doing Cardinal Walks at Ball State when we'd be thankful to have a couple hundred people out there ... Here you get off the bus and there's 10,000 lining the way for us to walk into the stadium. It's special to me every time."

Follow South Carolina football beat reporter Emily Adams on X @eaadams6 and subscribe to The Greenville News for exclusive Gamecocks content: https://subscribe.greenvilleonline.com/offers.

Get the latest news and insight on SEC football by subscribing to the SEC Unfiltered newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox.

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Pete Lembo is the face of South Carolina football's Beamer Ball 2.0