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CLEMSON -- The man who packed college stadiums and then NFL stadiums stood on the track infield at Liberty High School less than a year ago, and there were probably less than 100 spectators in the stands.

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C.J. Spiller did not volunteer to coach Liberty's track team as much to prepare himself for a coaching career as to serve his community.

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And on this day, he was trying to serve the psyche of an eighth-grade girl who tended to fret herself out of races before they even began.

"I'm nervous," the girl told Spiller as she anxiously spied competing hurdlers going through warm-ups.

The response: "You don't think I was nervous before every game?"

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Spiller's message to the hurdler that day was to channel the nervous energy into a positive, to combine the natural tension with the assurance that she had put in the work, and to trust the commitment she'd already made.

Over several years of volunteering at Liberty, Spiller said it was a challenge because the approach to track is much more generalized in South Carolina than the highly specialized world he remembers from Florida.

So instead of working specifically with the best athletes at the high school level, Spiller had to learn how to impart the basics to both boys and girls in grades ranging from sixth to 12th.

"The biggest thing I always told them: I'm going to show you guys respect, and I want the same thing in return," Spiller said last spring in an interview with Tigerillustrated.com. "That was really the only big thing I had with the athletes, is every day we're going to respect each other, we're going to respect authority, but at the same time we're going to come out here and work hard and get the work done and we're going to have fun. If we can do those things, this will be a great experience for you. But if you can't, then it probably won't be a great experience for you. Because Coach Spiller, he can kind of be a little mean."

Spiller laughed at that last part, because he understands it's hard for anyone to conceive of him being even a little mean.

He's just not that type of dude and never has been.

Now less than a year later, after a season working for his alma mater as an intern, Spiller is learning about coaching in an entirely new way.

When Tony Elliott was out with COVID for the Sugar Bowl, Spiller was the guy taking over the running backs on a temporary basis.

Now it's permanent, with last week's news that Danny Pearman is moving into an off-field role and Elliott taking over tight ends.

He's probably going to have to work on "being a little mean."

It was quite a week for Spiller, who learned last Monday he's being inducted into the 2021 College Football Hall of Fame class, and then later in the week that he's now coaching the position he played in college and in the NFL.

Beyond it making total sense that Dabo Swinney would choose one of his most beloved players and people to fill a vacancy, it also fits that Spiller took an unconventional route to this role.

You might recall that Elliott initially wasn't interested in coaching as a profession. He put his Engineering degree to good use and secured a good job at Michelin.

But something just didn't feel right, so Elliott decided to try coaching. And now he's persisting as a decorated offensive coordinator in an unconventional way because he's in less than a hurry to secure a head-coaching job when many people are wondering what's taking him so long.

We could also mention the story of Swinney himself, who after getting fired from a failed staff at Alabama had become extremely successful selling commercial real estate.

He'd already started to build the family's dream home in Alabama when Tommy Bowden called to ask him if he'd like to join a coach on the hot seat. He felt a calling and took that leap of faith.

Years later, he turned down a chance to work for Nick Saban at Alabama after Saban offered him a chance to double his salary. Unconventional, for sure.

When we spoke with Spiller last spring, he wasn't sure what he wanted to do. Full-time coaching didn't fully resonate to him because it meant less time being able to visit with his daughter, who lived in Orlando.

At the time he was on the IPTAY Board of Directors as a fundraiser but felt a bit awkward calling people to ask for large sums of money.

He knew he was going to be married soon thereafter, but beyond that he didn't know what shape his life would take.

So he applied himself to shaping the minds of young track athletes in middle school and high school.

Spiller, back to that conversation with the nervous eighth-grader:

"I always tried to tell her: 'Don't give your opponent any more ammunition than what they already have going into a race. Just focus on yourself. Just trust what you're doing, and you'll be fine. You could be going against a 12th grader who's been doing it for several years now. Don't get caught up in that. The only thing I want you to do is just give me great effort. I can live with the results. But if you don't give me great effort, I can't live with that."

It was a window into Spiller as a coach, and some foreshadowing of a career that began far earlier than he or anyone imagined.

The Lightning is back inside Clemson's running backs room. And he's going to have to work on the being mean part.

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