Maxwell Iyama committed to South Carolina’s football program in April. He fully committed to his high school team a few months later.
Mike Copley, Iyama’s high school coach at Siegel in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, remembers the muggy weather that surrounded his Stars during a preseason practice at the University of Tennessee-Martin. It was hot, he said, and with heat can come struggle for a bunch inching through training camp.
But Iyama, all 6-foot-6 and 305 pounds of him, wouldn’t stand for any dragging.
“It just flipped for him,” Copley recalled. “He flipped a switch. He was the first one there and the last to leave.