The Clemson Coaches Who Supplied Prescription Drugs to Athletes

The January 21, 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated placed Clemson University’s athletic drug practices in public view after the death of track athlete Augustinus Jaspers. Jaspers had died in his dormitory room. Police later found unlabeled prescription drugs among his belongings. The discovery did not produce a finding that steroids caused his death, but it brought investigators to the question of how prescription drugs had entered the orbit of Clemson athletes. The inquiry soon moved beyond one student’s room and toward the coaches who controlled training, access, and authority.

The article named Stan Narewski, Clemson’s men’s track and cross-country coach, and Sam Colson, who coached the women’s track and cross-country teams while also serving as a strength and conditioning coach. Their positions gave them daily proximity to athletes whose scholarships and competitive futures depended on the program. Both men admitted supplying drugs to student-athletes. The admission transformed the controversy from a question about unidentified medication into a documented account of coaches providing controlled substances within a university sports environment.

The distinction between the substances mattered less to the athletes than it did to the law. Prescription drugs and anabolic steroids occupied different medical and criminal categories, but both could be placed in the hands of competitors by staff members who were not authorized to dispense them. Clemson’s coaches were not merely discussing training theory or nutrition. They were connected to the distribution of drugs to student-athletes, and the authority of the coaching position supplied the access point.

On March 4, 1985, a Pickens County grand jury indicted Colson, Narewski, and Jack Harkness. Harkness was a former Clemson assistant football coach and assistant strength coach. The charges accused all three men of illegally dispensing prescription drugs. The indictments gave the case named defendants, a prosecutorial theory, and a court in which the allegations would be resolved. What had begun as a university scandal now carried the consequences of criminal process.

The indictments did not lead to a single trial that tested every allegation surrounding Clemson athletics. On March 11, Circuit Judge C. Victor Pyle handled the cases of Colson and Narewski through plea-bargain agreements. Colson received three years of probation and a $2,000 fine. Narewski received one year of probation and a $750 fine. The sentences were specific to the offenses and defendants before the court. They were not a judicial declaration that every Clemson athletic program had participated in drug distribution.

The unequal penalties also showed how the legal system translated institutional conduct into individual cases. Colson, who combined a head coaching role with responsibility for strength and conditioning, received the longer probationary term and the larger fine. Narewski, the men’s track and cross-country coach, received a shorter term and smaller financial penalty. Neither man went to prison. The plea resolutions closed their criminal exposure through supervision and payment rather than a contested trial or a broad inquiry into the university’s athletic structure.

Harkness remained a separate case. On January 6, 1986, he pleaded guilty to distributing steroids to athletes. The court imposed suspended sentences, a fine, and an order requiring reimbursement. His guilty plea supplied the clearest legal finding in the scandal: a former assistant coach and assistant strength coach accepted criminal responsibility for putting steroids into athletes’ hands. The disposition was limited, but it established that the controversy had reached beyond allegations about prescription medication and into a steroid-distribution offense.

The human center of the scandal remained Jaspers, whose death had preceded the public investigation. His dormitory room connected the university’s athletic world to a police discovery of unlabeled prescription drugs. That fact carried weight because it forced attention onto the route by which medication reached athletes, but it did not identify steroids as the cause of death. The prosecutions that followed addressed illegal dispensing and distribution by named coaches. They did not determine how Jaspers died.

Four years later, the Clemson connection resurfaced in Toronto. On April 14, 1989, former Clemson track scholarship athlete Dave McKnight testified before a Canadian government inquiry that he and Desai Williams had taken anabolic steroids while competing for Clemson in 1979. The testimony reached backward across a decade, placing steroid use among scholarship athletes before the 1985 indictments. It added a corroborating thread to the earlier accounts of drug use, but it did not reopen the South Carolina prosecutions or alter the sentences imposed on Colson and Narewski.

McKnight’s testimony also widened the chronology without widening the judgment. It described what two athletes had taken while on Clemson track scholarships in 1979; the 1985 court proceedings involved three named former coaches and charges of illegally dispensing prescription drugs; Harkness’s later plea concerned distributing steroids to athletes. Those events formed a connected history, not one universal legal finding about Clemson sports. The consequences remained attached to the people and offenses that prosecutors brought into court.

By January 1986, the measurable outcomes were probation, fines, suspended sentences, reimbursement, and one guilty plea. The university’s athletic reputation had been tied to a system in which coaches could supply drugs to competitors, while the legal response divided responsibility among individual defendants. Jaspers’s death continued to define the public entry point, but the courts did not assign steroids as its cause. The scandal ended in case-specific punishments, leaving the broader institutional questions outside the judgments that had been entered.