Sportico: How Clemson Men’s Track Was Saved By Title IX Lawyers’ Hardball

How Clemson Men’s Track Was Saved By Title IX Lawyers’ Hardball

5/18/2021 by Daniel Libet

It’s not every day that a powerful, $132-million athletic department gets beaten into retreat by one of its moderately budgeted Olympic sports programs. In fact, the central plot in the story of Clemson University’s men’s track and field and cross country teams’ reinstatement had never before happened—male college athletes successfully leveraging Title IX legal action to spare their sports from the chopping block.

“What was accomplished was historic,” said Arthur Bryant, the Bay Area attorney who represented the Clemson men and who, four decades earlier, served as lead trial counsel for the female plaintiffs in Haffer v. Temple, the first Title IX case brought against a university for discriminating against its athletes.

On April 22, five months after Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich announced their shuttering, Clemson agreed to reinstate the men’s track and field and cross country teams under pressure from not just 23 male runners, who threatened to file a lawsuit, but also a group of female athletes, who likewise threatened the ACC school with their own lawsuit. The move to eliminate the programs had also prompted a race discrimination complaint late last year with the Department of Education.

Click here to read more about this story detailing Bailey Glasser's Arthur Bryant's work on this case.