MIDDLETOWN, Del. — NaShawn Lloyd didn’t have to drive the Bay Bridge more than 1,000 times in the last four years. She sure didn’t want to.

“We’re scared of that bridge,” she said.

“I’m not scared of the bridge,” her teenage son said. “I was scared because you were scared of driving!”

To be fair, lots of people are scared of driving over the Bay Bridge, which stretches 4.3 miles across the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, rising as high as 186 feet above the often-churning water. (“Travel & Leisure” magazine named it the eighth-scariest bridge in the world.) There are even commercial enterprises in the state that will meet drivers on one side of the bridge and drive their client’s car across it.

NaShawn Lloyd’s teenage son is MarShawn Lloyd, and without those hundreds of trips they made together across the Bay Bridge and back every day, we might not know who he is.

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That would be particularly bad for South Carolina because MarShawn is the most important player in its 2020 recruiting class, a four-star running back who is expected to sign on Dec. 18, the first day of the early signing period.

The 5-foot-10, 200-pounder is rated a five-star prospect by Rivals.com. His four-star ranking comes from 247Sports’ composite system, which ranks him the seventh-best running back and 39th-best player at any position in the nation.

“There’s been a great buzz about him for years now,” 247Sports director of recruiting Steve Wiltfong said. “He’s got the traits to be one of the best running backs in the SEC and in the country. He’s fast, he can change direction, he’s got good balance and he’s explosive. We’re talking about a guy who can erase angles and make people miss in the open field.”

In short, he’s the player South Carolina has been looking for since 2013. That’s when Mike Davis ran for 1,183 yards to become the Gamecocks’ most recent 1,000-yard rusher. One thousand-yard seasons are a rare find in South Carolina’s record books. The Gamecocks have had a rusher surpass that mark nine times since 1947 and three of those were courtesy of George Rogers. Since Rogers left town in 1980, five South Carolina running players have surpassed 1,000 yards on the ground: Duce Staley in 1996, Derek Watson in 2000, Marcus Lattimore in 2010 and Davis in 2013. In those five seasons, the Gamecocks’ average record is 8.4-4. In the 39 other seasons, their average record is 5.9-5.8.

“In most situations, the defensive coordinator is going to have enough guys in the box to stop the run. (As a defensive coordinator) you have to have multiple hats at the ball if you know there is a guy who can take it the distance on any play. It certainly changes the game, absolutely,” South Carolina head coach Will Muschamp said before this season. “You have to have that guy that can run through contact, that can hit the hole and run and turn a 4- to 6-yard gain into a 60-yard gain, and we haven’t done that consistently enough at South Carolina in my three years.”

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The Gamecocks didn’t get any better in that area this year. They finished 10th in the SEC with 4.54 yards per carry and 13th with 5.18 yards per play.

That’s why Lloyd is so important for South Carolina. He is the second-highest rated player to sign with the Gamecocks under Muschamp, behind five-star defensive tackle Zacch Pickens, and the second-highest rated running back ever to sign with the team, after Lattimore.

“From a pure, ‘Did they hit a home run or get a guy you feel like there’s no way he can miss?’ standpoint, it’s been a while,” Wiltfong said. “This is certainly the most high-profile running back they have signed in a while.”

Giving her son the best chance to have such a high profile is why NaShawn Lloyd made all those drives over the Bay Bridge. The Lloyds live in Middletown, Del., which is a two-hour drive from DeMatha Catholic High School, just outside Washington. DeMatha, a private high school with an $18,000 annual tuition, plays in the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference. The Stags traditionally have one of the nation’s best high school athletic programs and, like their powerhouse rivals, offer financial aid to athletes.

Lloyd got on the radar of the WCAC school powers as a member of the Wilmington (Del.) Soldiers, a youth team that played in the showcase Grassroots Youth Football League in the region. According to DeMatha head coach Bill McGregor, in 2015, Lloyd, Blake Corum and Osman Savage were the hottest eighth-grade running back prospects in the area. Corum and Savage went to Saint Francis in Baltimore and are four-star prospects committed to Michigan.

Lloyd chose DeMatha.

NaShawn Lloyd, that is.

“It wasn’t a decision he had much say in,” NaShawn said. “What I said to him was, ‘I’m going to make this decision for you because you’re a child, and I know what’s best for you at this point, but when it’s time for you to go to college, you’ll be a young man and that decision you can make on your own.’”

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MarShawn and NaShawn sat down with The Athletic earlier this month at a Friendly’s restaurant directly across the street from Middletown High School, where MarShawn wanted to play high school football — and where he would have if his mother hadn’t decided he was headed to DeMatha.

“I thought he could get more out of DeMatha than he could going to Middletown High,” NaShawn said.

“I was mad, but it actually worked out for the best,” MarShawn said. “It was one of the best decisions I have made …. well, that she’s made for me.”

MarShawn quickly fell in love with DeMatha despite a four-hour daily commute that required he and his mother to leave the house by 5:15 a.m. And DeMatha loved him right back.

“He’s an outstanding football player,” McGregor said. “He did it all here. Very hard working, very diligent. He wants to be good (and) works to be good. I can’t say anything other than great things about him. He made incredible plays for us this year. Anytime he touches the ball, he can go all the way. He always did what he was supposed to do. You can’t help but like a kid like that.”

McGregor is not MarShawn’s biggest cheerleader at DeMatha, though. That’s Joan Phalen, the co-director of the school’s academic support team.

“I am a huge fan,” Phalen said. “Sometimes, he feels like my son.”

Phalen works in an office overlooking the perfectly tiny and dusty gym where Morgan Wootten won most of his 1,274 high school basketball games, the most by any basketball coach in history by the time Wootten retired. Phalen has tutored plenty of athletes at the school — perhaps most notably Markelle Fultz, the No. 1 pick in the 2017 NBA Draft — but rarely has encountered any who took the school’s academic offerings more seriously than Lloyd, she said.

“He’s a pretty unique teenager in that even as a late freshman, beginning sophomore, he was incredibly mature and focused,” Phalen said. “He started out at a point that was much more mature than a lot of other sophomores. I saw that with his dedication to schoolwork, with his ability to keep some distance from his peers when he needed to keep a distance from his peers just in terms of focus, and yet he did it all in a very, very quiet and humble way. There is no bravado. There’s no swagger that I saw in him.”

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When injuries cost Lloyd parts of his freshman and sophomore seasons, he didn’t let those setbacks affect him in the classroom, Phalen said.

“Those two years weren’t full-fledged years for him as an athlete, and I didn’t see him waver at all academically,” she said. “He’s just gotten stronger and stronger and stronger academically. It has been fun for me to see how his confidence has grown as a student.”

It grew as an athlete as well. He rushed for 1,197 yards and 11 touchdowns on 132 carries as a senior, and he holds the school records in his weight class for bench press (345 pounds), squat (520 pounds) and bench press repetitions of 225 pounds (20). At a recruiting showcase, he ran an electronically timed 4.51 in the 40-yard dash and had a 36-inch vertical leap.

DeMatha assistant coach Josh Wilson, a cornerback in the NFL for nine seasons, described Lloyd as “a dude.” Lloyd became a national name this season when he hurdled a defender during a touchdown run in a play that topped the “SportsCenter” Top 10.

He went WAAAYY UP 🤯🤯⬆️

@LloydMarshawn
(Via: @MonSportsNet)

— Hudl (@Hudl) October 26, 2019

“I have never seen anything like it,” McGregor said. “It’s as good a football play as I bet they have had on ‘SportsCenter’ all year. It was legit.”

Lloyd “set that up,” he said.

“Guys like to tackle me down low, and I knew he was going to go low. He put his head down, and I jumped right over him,” Lloyd said. “I didn’t even know during the play that I had stiff-armed somebody. I just knew that I scored. One of my friend’s dad called me and said, ‘You’re on ‘SportsCenter.’’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’  You don’t see a kid from Delaware doing things like that.”

You do see kids from DeMatha do things like that sometimes, though. McGregor has coached 21 NFL players during his 30 years as DeMatha’s head coach, and Ohio State defensive end and Heisman Trophy finalist Chase Young is a recent graduate.

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“Everybody asks me, ‘Who’s the best?’ I’m never going to say who’s the best, but (Lloyd) is good,” McGregor said. “He’s right up there at the top with everybody.”

That’s why Lloyd had scholarship offers from LSU, Ohio State, Alabama, Georgia and just about every other college football powerhouse in the country, and why it was a surprise when he committed to the Gamecocks in May.

“The vibe was that Georgia was the team to beat early on, but he took a couple of visits to South Carolina and really liked it,” Wiltfong said. “(Gamecocks running backs coach) Thomas Brown does as good a job as anybody of building relationships with these young men. I think that’s the biggest difference in this situation.”

Still, it almost never happened. The day before Lloyd made his official visit to South Carolina’s campus, he asked his mother if they could cancel the trip, he said.

“She was like, ‘You have to go. We already paid for the tickets. We have to go,’” MarShawn said. “I got down there and fell in love with everything. Everything just felt perfect about South Carolina. It just felt like it was the best fit for me. I just felt like it was a place I could grow up early, probably play at a young age. That was something that really opened me up to them. They said they need a guy. They have guys, but they want someone that is just like Marcus Lattimore. They want someone who is a program-changer. The guy. I heard that from a lot of different colleges, but something about South Carolina, it felt real. Their words were genuine.”

When Lloyd returned from Columbia, he canceled the rest of his official visits. Unlike most people, Phalen was not surprised Lloyd chose South Carolina over more name-brand programs, she said.

“He’s not wowed by some of the label stuff. He would be much more wooed by a relationship. That would be something that would be very important to him,” she said. “They may not want to hear this, but I don’t remember MarShawn wearing a lot of South Carolina stuff this fall. Whereas you see a lot of other kids wearing stuff. He’s just not that way. He’s an unassuming, quiet, humble, hard-working kid who has a passion for his sport.”

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Lloyd didn’t grow up watching football and thus never developed an affinity for any particular school, he said.

“I didn’t have a favorite college team,” he said. “I just started watching football recently. Alabama is an amazing school, and Georgia is too, but I wanted to go somewhere I could feel comfortable with. I wanted to go somewhere for myself and not what everybody else wanted.”

Lloyd’s commitment to South Carolina did not stop other schools from recruiting him, even though DeMatha’s coaches have done the best they can to shield him from anyone else.

“We are pretty old-fashioned,” McGregor said. “I’m pretty strong with the kids. Once you make a verbal commitment, we expect you to stick by it. MarShawn did not want to talk to anybody. We always say the same thing (to other colleges), ‘I know you’ll respect our wishes. He’s satisfied with where he’s going. I’ll let you know if anything changes, but I know you’ll respect his wishes.’ If they don’t respect his wishes, that tells you a whole lot about that school, too.”

Still, other schools keep checking in just to make sure, Lloyd said, but he ignores all the texts, even those from Maryland running backs coach Elijah Brooks, who was Lloyd’s head coach at DeMatha for three seasons. Brooks was the Stags head coach for seven years after McGregor retired. McGregor was lured back to the job when Brooks left for Maryland.

“It was very difficult to say no to him,” Lloyd said. “It’s also very hard to ignore him.”

That hasn’t been the toughest thing Lloyd has had to do this year, though. That was withdrawing from DeMatha, which does not allow early graduations. Lloyd plans to enroll at South Carolina in January in order to participate in spring practice, which requires that he graduate high school by the end of December.

“MarShawn desperately wanted to graduate from DeMatha, and I always say to him, ‘As far as I’m concerned, you graduated from DeMatha,’” Phalen said. “In some ways, there is tremendous pressure put on them by college coaches to get there early. The pressure is so immense, and it’s immense on the family as well.”

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The Lloyds asked DeMatha last summer if early graduation would be an option and were told no, prompting MarShawn to take several online courses along with his regular fall schedule at DeMatha. He is finishing his degree by taking online classes in Delaware.

“It was definitely a tough decision,” he said. “Not being able to finish was tough.”

He withdrew from the school the week after the Stags were eliminated from the playoffs.

— MarShawn Lloyd (@m_lloyd_2) November 19, 2019

McGregor declined to talk about Lloyd’s departure from the school except to say the school’s academic support team is “all sad he’s gone.” The Lloyds have valued their privacy throughout this process and didn’t share their intention to withdraw with many people out of a desire not gain unwanted attention, NaShawn said. The Gamecocks encouraged Lloyd to graduate early, she said.

“He doesn’t really like a lot of attention so he tries to sway away from it,” she said. “It’s kind of interesting to see how he reacts to it. He’s kind of shy.”

Even with such an intense spotlight on college football recruiting, especially on elite prospects, Wiltfong had no idea Lloyd lived two hours from DeMatha until informed by The Athletic.

“That’s news to me,” he said.

Lloyd also conducts few phone interviews despite numerous reporters who reach out. He did not reply to an interview request from The Athletic until after a reporter met with McGregor and Phalen, who then reached out to Lloyd.

“I’ve never talked to him on the phone, but he’s great in person,” Wiltfong said. “You never hear a bad word about MarShawn and the way he carries himself.”

(Top photo of MarShawn Lloyd: Josh Holmberg / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)