A Florida state court judge has awarded $771,000 to the former head football coach of Bethune-Cookman University, finding that the school breached its contract after it fired the coach in 2009.
However, plaintiff Alvin Wyatt did not get everything he sought. The court held that he failed to prove his age discrimination claim, noting that he had not provided “a shred of evidence” of a discriminatory motive on the part of the school’s former president.
The school’s winningest coach, Wyatt, was fired two days after his team was trounced 42-6 by archrival Florida A&M University in the Florida Classic. Wyatt, 62 at the time, was replaced by Brian Jenkins, then 39. BCU continued to pay Wyatt his $95,000 salary until June 30, 2010.
Wyatt sued, claiming he was owed more. The court agreed in part, awarding Wyatt $561,924 for four years of salary and benefits, $180,000 in guaranteed income and a retirement match of $28,753.
The judge reasoned that the contract was to automatically renew and roll over annually for an additional year if the coach “receives a satisfactory evaluation of his job performance and/or coaches the football team to nine victories.”
Wyatt fell short of nine wins in each season after the contract started. However, he never received an unsatisfactory evaluation.
“A written evaluation of the coach’s performance was introduced into evidence containing a glowing performance evaluation as of June 30, 2008,” according to the court. “The coach also testified that the athletic director (Lynn Thompson) verbally gave him a satisfactory evaluation after the successful fall 2008 season and promised to put it in writing but never got around to it.”
Strengthening the plaintiff’s case was the fact that BCU did not produce any evidence that it had given the coach an unsatisfactory evaluation.
The school tried unsuccessfully to convince the court that the firing was a decision to make a change in the “programmatic direction of the college,” which would have limited BCU’s liability to two years of the contract. In ruling for the plaintiff, the court considered the timing of the firing — Wyatt was fired just two days after a big loss in the Florida Classic, and not several weeks or months later.
“The evidence is that President Reed made the decision to fire the coach at the game and finalized her decision after talking with the AD (Thompson),” the judge wrote. “She wasn’t interested in changing the program, she was interested in winning games.”
Daytona Beach attorney Pete Heebner, who represented Wyatt, was pleased with the ruling.
“Obviously we were quite pleased with the result. Portions of the award were reduced by the court, and that’s OK. It’s up to the court,” Heebner told the media. “We were disappointed the age discrimination claim didn’t have traction with the judge. Those are very difficult cases to win, as I have found in most instances.”
Wyatt’s case is one of more than a dozen state and federal lawsuits as well as administrative complaints filed over the last two years against the school and personally against the school’s president.
