For 48 years, Edna Ratcliff has been part of the scene outside South Carolina home games, standing on Bush River Road and waving a Gamecock flag as the USC buses roll past on the way to their pregame hotel. And in 2024, Shane Beamer finally turned that familiar routine into something more.
Ratcliff, 85, has been showing up since 1980, when Jim Carlen was coaching the Gamecocks and George Rogers was only months away from winning the Heisman Trophy. Back then, she and her late husband, Billy, were raising their two teenage daughters in Columbia.
A lot has changed since then. The team hotel is different now - it moved from a Sheraton to a DoubleTree by Hilton - and the Ratcliffs no longer wait at the hotel.
They stand outside their home instead. But the ritual has stayed the same through five coaching changes, from Carlen to Richard Bell to Joe Morrison and eventually to Beamer.
Ratcliff has been there for all of it, whether anyone noticed or not. Her daughter, Sharon Biggers, said, “She’s out there if she’s sick.
She’s out there if she’s tired,” Ratcliff’s daughter, Sharon Biggers, said. “She’s always out there.
Always out there. I usually come over if I can.
… But she never misses.”
For years, the response from the buses was minimal. Sometimes a wave, sometimes nothing at all.
When Steve Spurrier passed by, that alone felt like a major moment. Then came the 2024 home game against Texas A&M, when the buses turned onto Bush River Road and slowed down.
“I kept saying, ‘I’m going to jail. I’m going to jail,’” Ratcliff told The State. “The highway patrol (car) stopped right in front of me.”
No trouble followed. Instead, Beamer got off the bus and hugged Ratcliff and her daughter, Laura LaPierre. “ We’re thankful for you guys,” Beamer told them.
A week later, after South Carolina beat No. 10 Texas A&M, Beamer talked for more than 2½ minutes about the Ratcliffs and why the visit mattered to him.
“They’re always there on the corner for as long as I can remember,” Beamer said in 2024. “Hot, cold, rain, sun, windy, calm, losing record, winning record - whatever it might be, they’re always there.”
Beamer had already told the team that the buses would stop that day because, as he put it, “these ladies stand outside every Friday just to see the buses drive by for five seconds and wave at you,” and he wanted the players to thank them.
He did more than that. He invited the Ratcliffs onto the buses so they could greet the players they had been cheering for every week. Sharon said, “Exactly what you think is exactly how it felt,” while Ratcliff said, “We had no idea they’d ever do something like that.”
Each of Ratcliff and her two daughters went on separate buses. Beamer asked them to address the team, and Laura LaPierre took the assignment seriously.
She wanted to find quarterback LaNorris Sellers, whom Beamer directed her toward on bus No. 1.
Sellers was a redshirt freshman still searching for consistency and confidence, and Laura told him to think back to high school, when he was playing with his brother and everything felt easier.
“You were having fun, right?” she told Sellers. “Just go out there and have fun.”
“He went undefeated (the rest of the season),” Laura joked.
The family got another chance to greet the team before this September’s home opener against Kent State. The heat was brutal enough to make the sidewalk sweat, but the Ratcliffs were still out there, waving and cheering as the buses came through.
“It wasn’t too hot for them,” Beamer said of the Bush River crew during his postgame news conference.
This time, Beamer greeted them like old friends and then pulled Laura back toward bus No. 1 for another quick message to Sellers.
“I said, ‘Just play your game. Play your game,’” Laura said she told Sellers. “And Shane (screams to the whole bus), ‘See guys - just play your game.’”
The family’s connection to South Carolina runs deep. Ratcliff often wears a pink shirt and carries a white flag from another era.
As she tells it, former South Carolina coach Paul Dietzel went to the Columbia Chamber of Commerce asking for the flags flying at Main Street shops to be displayed on Saturdays. Some people - likely fans of another state school - objected, and the flags came down.
Her fandom goes back even further. Her father, Edwin Zobel, played for South Carolina from 1927-29. Ratcliff attended her first USC game in 1959, the Carolina-Clemson game that was the final “Big Thursday” matchup, and she has sat in section 306, row 8 for the last 58 years.
Her stories jump across decades and don’t always come with a year attached. Sometimes she talks about her parents dropping her off at the fair in the 1950s while she kept riding the Ferris wheel to watch the game. Other times she remembers the crack of a play and seeing Marcus Lattimore on the ground, crying alongside her family.
At times, she marks history by coach instead of by date. “that’s when Mus-crap was there,” she said, describing a blistering hot game. For Ratcliff, Gamecock football has always been bigger than a calendar.
The tradition still feels like an event every Friday. A day before South Carolina played Mississippi State in September, Sharon said Ratcliff had her hair in curlers and pizza rolls on the counter: “it’s a pre-gate on Fridays,” Sharon said. Guests arrive, and around 5:55 p.m. the family heads outside to wait.
The buses usually come through around 6 p.m. Until then, it’s a short stretch of standing around and listening for the sirens. On that day, Laura’s daughter Kendall and her daughter Maddie were there too, making it a four-generation gathering.
At 6:02 p.m., the sirens finally sounded. The buses flew by.
Beamer leaned over the railing and waved. Ratcliff gripped her flag tightly so the wind wouldn’t take it.
And just like that, another 15-second moment was in the books.
“We’re not gonna miss it,” Ratcliff said. “Means that much to us.”
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