Recent South Carolina commit, Michael Wyman, was a late bloomer when it comes to football.
“I started playing football when I was 15,” Wyman said. “I really wasn’t that interested, I always loved football but I loved basketball much more when I was younger.”
It was the wide receiver’s peers that made him defect from the parquet to the gridiron.
“My friends played a big role in [me changing to football],” Wyman said. “Without them I probably wouldn’t know much about football because all of my friends were football players and just influenced me into playing the game.
Growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina, Wyman is the youngest of three brothers and one sister.
“I loved hanging out with my older brothers [when I was younger],” Wyman said. “Because growing up I didn’t do a lot of kids stuff because my brothers were eight years older than me and I always hung out with them and had to do the stuff that they did.”
Wyman never played with toys, and often accompanied his brothers to the mall and doing whatever they did whether it be in the gym. Wyman still gets the youngest sibling treatment.
“[I got tough love] all of the time even to this day,” Wyman said. “They really helped me and always told me to be the best you can be everyday, to have no regrets and to leave it all on the field.”
Wyman was a big man at the start of his football career. The South Carolina wide receiver played on the offensive line and defensive line in pop warner. He also dabbled as a linebacker.
“I mainly played defense, I never really play much of offense,” Wyman said. “Because I was too big to run the ball.”
Wyman always wanted to play on the offensive side the ball and it put everything into perspective.
“It just humbled me a lot because I always wanted to play offense,” Wyman said. “But people always told me you was too big, too slow so I just used that to humble myself and make myself better.”
Wyman started getting taller and became one of the fastest kids on the team and originally wanted to play quarterback. Deemed not good enough at that position, he transitioned to running back and was clueless.
“I didn’t know what to do at running back,” Wyman said. “So I rode the bench my whole seventh grade year and I wanted to quit football but one of my coaches coach Mack told me to hit him up over the Summer and we worked on everything and my eighth grade year that was my breakout year.
To get faster and slimmer, he ran against his brothers and cousins. With the training, he worked his way to huge part of his team at Dudley High School.
His best memory of high school, was a night spent with teammates.
“We had camp and we stayed the night at the school and it was a blast,” Wyman said. There’s no parents there it’s just you and the boys waking up at 5:00 a.m., so it was kind of the college life a little.”
Before he knew it, college scouts began coming to his games and after all the hard work he put in, he was not surprised that it happened.
“I worked all my life for that since I was a young’n,”Wyman said. “So I was prepared for that, it was more excitement most definitely.”
Wyman was invited on many college tours as teams courted the North Carolina native. Schools that have the best football programs in the college like Georgia invited Wyman which caused a bit of an overwhelming feeling.
“I was just a young kid coming from a small town,” Wyman said. “Now I’m at these big schools and big cities and it’s just like, ‘Wow this is really happening.'”
It all came down to a hard decision. Wyman spoke over it with his girlfriend Dorah Davis, his mother, and his coaches to see what would be the best option for him.
Ultimately he chose the school just a state away. That is South Carolina. There were a few reasons he wanted to be a Gamecock.
“It was just the pretty much the coaches and the environment,” Wyman said. “That was it basically.”
The late blooming Wyman has now set new goals for his next chapter. To put it simply, he wants it all.
“I want everything,” Wyman said. “I want to be a first round pick, as a matter a face the first pick in the Draft.”
