USC soccer’s Claire Griffiths making one last run in sports — and chasing a law degree

Claire Griffiths is pursuing a national championship with the South Carolina women’s soccer team. Away from Stone Stadium, she’s working on her law degree.

Griffiths, a fifth-year midfielder and sixth-year student, is in a program that would allow her to get a juris doctor/master of social work dual degree. Last season was her first year in law school, an endeavor that was full of scheduling challenges across the board.

Life as a student-athlete presents its own unique grind, but coupling that with being a full-time law student makes for a profoundly more difficult semester.

That balancing act has followed Griffiths her entire life.

She grew up in a house with two other soccer players — her sisters — chasing each other around the field. At the same time, she was learning to be disciplined in her studies, evolving into a successful student.

As a first-year law student last year — also known as a “1L” — her load quickly became cumbersome. In the midst of studying for torts law and criminal law classes, the Gamecocks made a run to the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament under head coach Shelley Smith.

Staying organized with her workload, however, was something Griffiths, 23, had grown accustomed to doing.

Through planning, communicating with professors and forming relationships within the law school, she found a way to merge her athletic and academic lives together.

“She’s feeling less stressed and so excited about finishing off her college career,” Smith said.

Law school option was ‘love at first sight’

Griffiths is a three-time member of the SEC Academic Honor Roll. She also made the honor roll all four years of her high school career at Millbrook in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Her dedication to her studies started in childhood, as her parents established schoolwork as a foundation for Griffiths and her sisters.

She grew to embrace the presence and importance of school in her life.

“I’ve built passions and I’ve built an identity outside of being just a soccer player,” Griffiths said. “And that’s been integral to my success off the field. And building my identity and finding what I’m passionate about has taken my academics to a whole new level.”

One of her passions is helping people, reflected by her selection to the SEC Community Service Team last year — an honor that recognized her being a youth soccer coach and student mentor at local elementary school, and a volunteer for the Salvation Army, Pets Inc. shelter and Habitat for Humanity.

She said she liked working with children and people in underserved populations, and considered herself a “people person.”

She attended Florida State in her freshman year and redshirted that season. She didn’t declare a major during that time but settled on psychology with a social work minor when she came to South Carolina.

In one of her social work classes, she got introduced to the J.D./MSW dual-degree program, which she learned was offered at USC.

She had two years of sports eligibility left at the time, and also knew “soccer does come to an end” eventually. So she decided on joining the dual-degree program.

“It was just love at first sight,” Griffiths said. “I knew that was my calling, and definitely where I wanted to go.”

‘Competitive as ever’ among Griffiths sisters

Soccer was ever-present in Griffiths’ home growing up.

Her twin sister, Lauren, and her older sister, Paige, played the same sport. Each of the three went on to play it at the Division-I level.

This made the household competitive. They’d chase each other around the soccer field, with the young athletes often bickering back and forth.

“My mom used to say we couldn’t play one-on-one against each other because it would always end in an argument,” Griffiths said.

But the three sisters also held each other accountable on the field.

If Griffiths made an error, her older sister would be there to say, “You know you can do better than that.”

Griffiths played alongside her twin sister at Millbrook High School and also for club teams. The two played with Paige for one year at Millbrook.

But years after Paige Griffiths left high school, she had the opportunity to play against her older sister.

The Gamecocks visited N.C. State in 2018, where Paige was playing. Against the older Griffiths, Claire scored the first goal of her college career.

“It was a full-circle moment, really,” Griffiths said. “It was so cool.”

She remembers little about the game, other than the goal and the result — a 2-1 USC loss.

A reporter asked after the game if she was happy to get the goal against her sister, despite the game’s result.

“I would have rather got the win,” Griffiths replied.

The next season, she and the Gamecocks managed to beat the Wolfpack at home in the season opener, with Paige recording an assist in the game.

“So I guess we’re even,” Griffiths said. “Again, competitive as ever.”

Balancing sports and school

The average day of class and practices had Griffiths running all over campus last year. A typical day might look like:

• 7:15 a.m. — Arrive to the soccer field for training.

• 8:40 — Run off the field, go to the locker room, change and run to the law school building.

• 9:10 — While sweaty from practice, arrive to the first of two straight classes.
  
  

• 12:30 p.m. — Take a “lunch break” and rejoin the soccer team to either lift weights or train on the field
  
  

• 3:10 — Return to class
  
  

• 4:30 — Get tutoring
  
  

• 5:30 — Head home to do readings and prepare for the next day, where the schedule is repeated once more.
  
  

“So, some long days,” Griffiths said.

Law school was uncharted territory for Griffiths.

Both of her parents went to medical school, but no one in her family had attempted law school.

“I dealt with a lot of impostor syndrome,” Griffiths said. “I felt out of my depths. I was really passionate about being there, but everyone else around me was talking about how their parents did this in the legal field and that.”

In the past 10 years, just three student-athletes have participated in law school at South Carolina, according to a school spokesman. Benjamin Bosmans-Verdonk of the USC men’s basketball team is currently a first-year law student this semester.

For Griffiths’ transition to law school, there was a lot to figure out, but she credited the people around her for the ability to handle the workload.

The program required a lot in the first year as she worked on the law component in the first semester. But she was willing to put in the work, and her professors, coaches and advisers were understanding of her situation.

“She really had to organize herself,” Shelley Smith said. “And she made it work.”

Her torts professor, Emily Suski, said it was easy to work with Griffiths during this time.

Griffiths told Suski she’d have to miss some classes, but vowed to stay on top of her work. Suski couldn’t recall Griffiths ever falling behind.

“She’s such a great student and so diligent,” Suski said. “Boundless energy.”

The amount of reading required for students adds to the rigor of law school. Students often have 30 to 40 pages of reading every night, and will get called on randomly by their teachers the next day about what they read.

“It’s particularly challenging reading as a first-year law student because there are terms used you’ve never seen or heard before,” Suski said. “There’s knowledge assumed that you probably don’t have just to understand what you’re reading. You have to figure out stuff you’ve never seen before.”

Griffiths worked with her academic adviser, Kaitlyn McCanna-Doty, a lot last year.

McCanna-Doty was the team’s academic adviser and has helped athletes in the past. In one of their first meetings, it was clear to her that Griffiths would perform well in law school.

“Hey, can I come in and talk with you about this?” Griffiths texted McCanna-Doty.

And when Griffiths came to her office, she was equipped with several sheets of paper, complete with graphs, charts and arrows to organize her class and practice schedule.

“I knew right away that being in law school was for her,” McCanna-Doty said.

Griffiths credited McCanna-Doty for “going through hurdles” to work with her, but also thanked her coaches and teammates for being patient with her as she juggled law school and practices.

She made a host of friends during this time, too, bonding with the other law students.

They helped each other gather notes and understand the material. They even helped Griffiths with her work while she was traveling for soccer, calling her while she was in a different state to work on assignments.

“I think it’s just a really cool community that I’ve built within the law school and within soccer,” Griffiths said. “Bridging those two and making my own little world has been awesome.”

Even as one of 72 students in Suski’s torts class, Griffiths found a way to stand out.

Suski’s daughter, 7 years old at the time, plays soccer for South Carolina United. Griffiths was visiting a coach she knew and ran into Suski at one of her daughter’s games.

“You’re my teacher,” Griffiths told Suski, who’d only seen her students with face masks on before this moment.

From there, Suski and her daughter attended some of Griffiths’ games, bringing her support from the classroom to the soccer field.

“It was a lot to juggle,” Suski said. “And she just managed it beautifully.”

Fourteen games into the Gamecocks’ season, Griffiths continues to work on her dual degree while helping USC avenge last year’s loss in the Elite Eight. USC is 9-2-3 overall with four regular-season games left, and she’s started in every game so far and scored two goals.

For Griffiths, 94 games into her career, she’s gotten the most strenuous part of the journey behind her.

“Everyone was like, ‘You made it through your first year of law school, you can absolutely do it again,’ ” Griffiths said. I’m really, really grateful that I do have this extra year to, hopefully, make a run at the Final Four and get over that hump.’ ”