Duke Lacrosse Sings Redemption Song

May 10, 2007 — -- Hooligans. Elitists. Chauvinists. Bigots.

Rapists.

With brush strokes that broad, it would be easy for members of the Duke men's lacrosse team to carry a chip on their jerseys when post-season play begins Saturday — a national championship tournament they enter as the No. 1 seed, a first-time achievement in the nearly 70-year history of the school's lacrosse program.

But the 41 members of the 2007 Duke lacrosse team aren't focused on revenge. Instead, they're eager to establish a new reputation as Division I national champions.

Duke enters the 16-team playoff with a 13-2 record — falling to Loyola and Cornell in March — and as champion of the Atlantic Coast Conference, a prize it claimed with a 12-9 win over Virginia at the end of April.

The team benefits from a cadre of 13 seniors, with star performers on the offense, defense and in the goal. Duke's No. 1 seed is not without controversy, given Cornell's undefeated season, but the seeding doesn't matter much to Duke. Besides, this is a team that, in the last 14 months, has grown accustomed to controversy.

"Last spring was completely unfair in the way lacrosse got labeled, in the way we got labeled as a collective group," said Matt Danowski, a senior attackman, captain and one of the players who submitted his DNA to police in March 2006 to clear his name of rape allegations.

"It was a rush to judgment and a rush to generalize," Danowski told ABC News. "Nobody was listening to us."

In retrospect, Danowski and his peers had a point. Last March, what they said was largely drowned out.

First came the allegations: Several players had gang-raped one of two black strippers hired by team captains to perform at an off-campus lacrosse party.

Before formal charges were filed, a tasteless e-mail — sent by a single player and released by authorities — helped convince Duke president Richard Brodhead that the team's 2006 campaign needed to end prematurely.

Longtime coach Mike Pressler, credited with building Duke into a national-caliber program, was forced to resign. Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong brought forward indictments, charging senior Dave Evans and sophomores Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann with a slew of offenses, including rape.

The university announced the creation of an independent panel to investigate the lacrosse team's behavior.

Fresh Start, Difficult Moments

In the 14 months since the lacrosse party went wrong, so much has changed.

The mental capacity of the accuser came into question. The tactics used by Nifong were increasingly scrutinized. The rape charges were dismissed. North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper took over the case. Cooper cleared Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann on all charges — and their Duke teammates were there to share in the relief.

On top of the rape saga, the Duke program lost a former player. Jimmy Regan, 26, was killed in February while fighting for the U.S. Army in northern Iraq.

When new head coach John Danowski, Matt's father and a 21-year coach at Hofstra University, arrived in Durham, he knew that his team — with 34 returning players from the 2006 squad — would face a unique challenge this season.

"The anger and resentment was there right from the first day because they knew nothing happened," said Danowski, who held venting sessions throughout the year to allow players to speak out about whatever was bothering them — their reputations on campus, the media coverage, losing a coach they respected and a 2006 season that, at one time, held so much potential.

Danowski also knew that to a certain extent, the team members had brought the entire situation upon themselves.

"Did they have the party? Yes. Were they remorseful? Yes," he said. "If they could go back in time, would they change the things that happened that night? Absolutely."

There were some steps that team members took to win back detractors. In the fall semester, the team notched a collective 3.45 grade point average. Players contributed nearly 600 hours of community service. They also stood by teammates who they firmly believed had been wrongly accused — by both the dancer, the university and many onlookers.

Channeling Motivation

When it came time for lacrosse season to begin, the athletes did what came most naturally: They played.

"Any time you can't play a sport that you love to play and it gets taken away from you, you feel you need to show people," said Tony McDevitt, a senior defenseman from Philadelphia. "It's a motivation for every guy in that locker room. There's no doubt about it."

But there's a critical difference between playing angry and using that anger effectively to motivate performance.

"Just because you went through something that was horrific doesn't mean that it's going to be a storybook and it's going to end terrific," Danowski said. "Don't use it as a crutch or an excuse — let's just keep moving forward and getting better."

Perhaps more than most teams, the members of Duke lacrosse were forced to rely on each other in ways that transcended passing and catching, scoring and making saves. Not surprisingly, it became a team marked by its cohesiveness.

"This is a group that was besieged by the outside world," said Michael Sachs, a sports psychologist at Temple University. "It was the perfect storm: elite university, privilege, an upper-class kind of sport, the sexual issues, the racial issues — it all pulled together for people to voice all sorts of social concerns, and they bore the brunt of all the criticism."

On the Duke bench, as players open their quest for the program's first championship, will be the jerseys of Finnerty and Seligmann — two players who would be on the field Saturday if it weren't for unfounded rape charges that forced them to leave Duke. The third player charged, Evans, graduated last spring.

Ed Douglas, a senior attackman from Baltimore, said that one of the most critical roles he had played this year as captain had been channeling a negative experience into positive motivation, a task made easier by a shared belief among his teammates.

"One of the things we always had that was a great benefit for us was confidence in the truth," Douglas said.

Watch Duke face off against Providence College Saturday at noon on ESPNU.