SUCCISA VIRESCIT: The story of the lacrosse team's regrowth

John Danowski is a hugger. He hugs people. He hugs his son, Matt, and his son's lacrosse teammates. Good play? Hug it out. Good practice? Hug it out. Coach just finished yelling at you? Hug it out. Matt and his teammates laugh about it, but all that hugging is probably for the best. * Because after everything that happened last spring, Duke Lacrosse definitely needed a hug.

Two days before his team's first "game" of the season-really, a pair of scrimmages against two other squads-Danowski walked into front lobby of the Murray Building, the facility next door to Koskinen Stadium that houses his office. A middle-aged Hispanic housekeeper was emptying one of the smaller trash cans into a larger one.

In his loud, booming voice, Danowski wished her a good morning in Spanish: "Hola, Celestina! Buenos días!"

In Spanish, Celestina replied, and asked the coach how he was. "Bien," the coach replied in Spanish. I'm doing well. In Spanish, he asked Celestina how she was doing.

"Muy bien," Celestina responded. I'm doing very well.

Danowski, the head coach at Hofstra for 21 years, wasn't picked to lead Duke's lacrosse program in the wake of the last spring's rape scandal because he makes Celestina happy, though that's part of it. And while his strategizing credentials are impressive-he is a former National Coach of the Year-they're also not why he was hired.

He knows that the Duke Lacrosse coach has to solve two big problems: an image problem and that whole perfection issue. He knows that the Duke Lacrosse coach has to be a ray of sunshine, the type of guy that everyone loves and the type of guy that makes everyone around him forget the bigger problems weighing down on them.

And this fifty-something, muscular, six-foot tall Long Islander with the boisterous personality and voice of a New York radio DJ and a master's degree in counseling is that that type of guy. And that's why he's the man to solve both of Duke Lacrosse's problems.

After arriving on campus in the fall, the first thing Danowski did was meet with the team's seniors. In the team room in the basement of the Murray Building, the players sat in front of a white board, Danowski held a marker in his hand, and the seniors, without their coach's help, proceeded to list their goals for the season, along with the obstacles they would face, some long-term and some immediate.

Some of those goals were the type you would expect from a recently successful college team looking to take the final step to national prominence and historical success-ACC Champs, No. 1 ranking, National Championship. And the obstacles to reaching those goals were predictable-fatigue, keeping the edge, ego, team balance, opponents, injuries, illness, lack of depth.

But what's telling is that those were the goals that came up last. The first goals up on the board were things like great senior leadership, great off-field behavior and improving community image. And the obstacles to those goals weren't the normal challenges facing NCAA men's lacrosse teams-media, pressure, alcohol, the Durham Police Department. And the immediate obstacles-the ones the players knew they needed to deal with first-were things like Tailgate, fighting, women, bar/public behavior and social leadership.

So Danowski didn't need to help them much. The seniors-the guys who experienced the extreme high of reaching the national championship game as sophomores and the low of having a season cancelled, a beloved coach fired and three teammates indicted on rape and sexual offense charges as juniors-knew what they had to do. The coach just put them in a position to articulate it. "It was all us," senior captain Tony McDevitt says. "He just sat there and was a scribe."

The move may seem a little cliché to an outsider, the seniors sitting down to list goals for the year, but no outsider went through what those 13 seniors experienced. None of them thought it was hokey or corny. It was intense and exciting, and by the time it finished, all of them were ready to get out on the field.

"It was our first time looking at Mr. Danowski as Coach Danowski and we laid it all out there. We talked amongst ourselves and we talked about the things we've gone through and what we want to do to change it-what we're going to be about for this upcoming season," McDevitt says. "[Coach] just kind of sat back and said, 'This is your team. This is your team. There are 13 seniors and this is your team. This is not my team.'"

Later, Danowski typed up the list of goals, adding "Duke Lacrosse 2007" and "Succisa Virescit"-the motto players chose for the season-to the top. At the bottom, he wrote "DECISION MAKING" in all capital letters and included an inspirational quote.

"Everybody thinks discipline is this rigid way of looking at life," Danowski says. "Discipline is just making the right decisions when you're faced with choices."

The quotes, the seniors-only meeting and the focus on smart decision making are the types of things Danowski does, fitting for a guy who earned a Masters in counseling and college student development at C.W. Post in Long Island in 1978. And it's fitting that Duke would hire a counselor to coach its lacrosse team, because the opposing squads that the players would face were almost secondary to the internal and off-the-field challenges they would encounter. The players knew it, and Danowski knew the players-especially the seniors-as the father of one of their best friends.

That fact, that Danowski is not an outsider, has been crucial. He went through everything the players went through last spring-not to the same degree as the players themselves, but as one of the players' parents. "No one talks about that fact, but it is most important," McDevitt says. "Everything that happened in the Spring of '06, he felt it, he was there. He was a parent and all of our parents went through this just like we did."

Up until last year, Danowski had been just a regular lacrosse parent. He came to his son's weekday games whenever he could, and if Hofstra was playing on a Friday, he showed up for Duke's Saturday games. His wife, Patricia, watched the games with the other parents, but the coach always stood apart, trying to avoid the other fathers who might want to discuss strategy with him. He considered Duke's now-former head coach Mike Pressler a good friend, and he brought his Hofstra teams down to Durham for pre-season scrimmages in the three years before Matt went to college.

When the first details of the party emerged, Danowski, like every other parent, felt his heart sink into his stomach, he says. Like the other parents, as details of the party were being investigated, he made sure his son knew to cooperate with the authorities. He talked to Matt, and he worried that his son wouldn't be happy because he was losing the chance to do something he loved.

As information piled up and the University suspended the season, Danowski hoped against hope that it wouldn't be cancelled. Then, when it was cancelled, and Pressler fell on his sword and resigned, Danowski says he felt awful. So he went through all that. He listened to the criticism endured by his son and his son's best friends, and he got mad, right along with the players and their parents. People who had never met any of the kids were calling them hooligans and underage drinkers and privileged white boy rapists.

"[Matt's] character was being questioned and that's where I struggled," Danowski says. "You know what, I'm a lacrosse coach at Hofstra, I'm making $80,000 dollars per year, if that makes my son privileged then so be it. All these things that they were being labeled-I thought it was so unfair."

Shortly after the party, Danowski's Hofstra team beat Army, a top-20 squad. He was walking through Hofstra's lacrosse facilities, and one of the local television reporters stuck a camera in his face and asked, "What do you think about what's happening down south?" That was the only time the coach lost it, he says. "First, I'm not there; I don't know what's going on," he says. "And number 2, you're taking away from what these 40 young men [from Hofstra] did on the field.. We learned very quickly that lacrosse was never the story."

As the situation developed, Danowski continued to worry (as only a parent can worry) about his son's physical safety on campus. So even though Danowski didn't go through what the players went through because he wasn't there in Durham alongside them, he was the next best thing.

When Pressler resigned, he broke the news during a team meeting in the squad room. McDevitt, a 6-foot, 210-pound Philadelphian who looks like the type of guy who cries every 15 years or so, says he broke down right there in the meeting. "It was a sad day, one of the saddest days I've had at Duke when Coach Pressler wasn't going to be our coach anymore," he says. Matt Danowski says he went back to his room and cried after the meeting, saying "it was the most emotional that I've ever been in my entire life."

Especially for the then-juniors, now-seniors on the team, Pressler was a beloved figure. In 16 years at Duke, the coach had taken the Blue Devils from a non-entity in the lacrosse world to the national championship game. But there was more to it than that.

"I feel confident saying I look at him as a father figure," McDevitt says, the tough guy's words just spilling out. "It's tough to put into words what he means to me and what he means to a lot of guys in this program.. He took Duke Lacrosse from the bottom of the barrel to as close as you can get to the top, and he did it through hard work, dedication and loyalty.

"He wants what's best for his players and he'll do whatever it takes, whatever it takes to make sure that his players are treated correctly and that they are getting what's best for them in their life. He taught life lessons every day we were out there. We were playing lacrosse but he'd say over and over again, 'Guys, one day you're not going to be playing this anymore, you're going to be sitting in an office, or you're going to be teaching. and the lessons you learn from me, that's when it's really going to matter. that's when its going to count..' He'll back up against that wall next to you and he'll take on anybody, as we've seen."

This was the guy that Danowski had to replace. And maybe if the administration had decided to bring in an outsider, a known disciplinarian who would clean up the team, then the players wouldn't have responded. But once the players knew they would have a season this year, and once they knew for sure that Pressler wouldn't be coming back, they started thinking about Matt's dad, as they knew him at the time.

After the program was reinstated, the elder Danowski also started thinking about the Duke job. He wasn't totally satisfied with his job at Hofstra, if you believe certain reports, because he didn't know if it was possible to take that program to a level in which it could compete for the National Championship every year. "Sometimes, I think that we were successful at Hofstra because we got lucky," he says. After Pressler's forced resignation and the program's reinstatement, midfielder Peter Lamade's father, Larry, was among the first to suggest to Danowski that he might be the right fit. Danowski says he was initially flattered, but then started to consider taking the job seriously.

He talked to his family, talked to Matt-who said, "Dad, this place has everything you want"-and and decided to apply. He hadn't updated his résumé in years, but he came to campus to interview and was eventually named one of four finalists. On July 21st, he was officially announced as Duke Lacrosse's next head coach.

In a lot of ways, Danowski is very different from Pressler. The old coach was old-school, a yes-sir-no-sir kind of guy; the new coach, "Coach Dino" to many of the players, would rather hear his players say, "I'm cool with that." Pressler was intense, making sure players heard about it when they made mistakes; Danowski is more of a guilt-tripper. And of course, there are the hugs and the good-natured teasing that goes along with them.

During fall practices, the team was trying out 15 or so potential walk-ons. But some of the players auditioning weren't National Championship-caliber, and the drills weren't going well. Danowski was visibly frustrated with the way practice was going-his players weren't getting better. Junior attackman Josh Coveleski sidled up to his coach and said, "Coach, you need a hug?" Danowski replied, "Yeah, Josh. I do." And they hugged it out on the field.

Danowski has also been a huge presence on campus, a quality not normally associated with any of Duke's other coaches. He has been known to sit down with students for a meal on-campus or off-campus, and no one that visits him in his office leaves without a Duke Lacrosse t-shirt. "He's kind of hurting my game," Matt Danowski jokes. "All the girls like him more than they like me now."

The coach even instituted a Date Night tradition with his charges, asking them to come to the volleyball team's Friday night matches in the fall with dates in tow. He told his players that he could help them find dates if they needed it, though none of them took him up on the offer. "I have friends, I'll be studying with them and they'll be like, 'I saw your coach today,'" Douglas says. "It's sort of shocking at first, just because it hadn't happened before. But it's also nice because I think it means there's going to be a greater connection between the student body and our team."

Making that connection has been one of Danowski's larger goals for his team, part of a larger effort to counteract some of the terrible publicity Duke Lacrosse got last spring. The players went with Danowski to the Ronald McDonald House to cook dinners during the fall semester-Douglas says teammate Rob Schroeder is a fantastic dessert chef, "which, with his physique you might be able to tell."

And anytime Danowski gets the chance to brag about his team to members of the media, he runs with it. "The team GPA this past fall was 3.45," he'll say. "And 88 percent of the players had a 3.0 or better." He was on Paula Zahn's television show, expecting to answer seven or eight questions about moving forward. Zahn asked only two questions, and the first dealt with the three indicted players. He had come armed with facts and figures about his team's academic and social behavior over the fall semester, and when Zahn asked her second question-"How's the team doing?"-he made sure to use them. "Let's let the world know that guys are doing great," he says. "Guys have dealt with this and they're doing the best they can with moving forward."

One of the reasons Danowski has been such a presence on campus has been the absence of his wife, Patricia, who stayed in New York when he moved down here. Though he has missed her dearly-"make sure you write that," he adds-it has also given him less incentive to go home, which keeps him more involved in his players' lives and more involved on campus. "I don't have any friends here," he jokes.

The situation actually mirrors Danowski's first lacrosse coaching job, at C.W. Post, where he was head lacrosse coach and also a residence hall director. "It was real easy to develop this real sense of family with them in terms of caring about one another," he says.

And then there are the text messages. Football player Zach Maurides, a senior who is friends with several lacrosse players, developed a program that allowed Danowski to text message all of the players at once. Matt says his father wasn't a big text messager before he got to Duke and had access to the program. "I remember asking him for text messaging on my phone," the younger Danowski says. "And he was like, what is that?"

But the coach has made use of it, texting the players almost every day. Sometimes, the messages just remind them of practices and meetings; other times, like on the night of the team's fall semi-formal, they encourage players to stay safe and make good decisions. Usually, several of the players will be hanging out together when Danowski sends a message, and they'll know the text is from him when they all reach into their pockets at the same time.

As for the quotes, one usually graces every piece of correspondence the players get from Danowski. They come from movie stars, Greek philosophers, leaders, generals and presidents. Sometimes they come from movies like Slapshot, one of Danowski's personal favorites, or from Duke Basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski's books. "I've built a library over the years," Danowski says.

He has installed a huge high-definition television in his office, and a blue couch and chair face it. He encourages his players to come in and talk about classes and their social lives, and to share any concerns they have about anything with him. "He likes to hear about your life," McDevitt says. He asks players about the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert they went to the night before, and he ends all telephone conversations with "Peace," not "Good-bye."

One of the reasons Danowski got into coaching in the first place was to form that relationship with the kids he coached. His father was the football coach at one of the two junior highs in the Long Island town where Danowski grew up, and he saw the genuine love and care between his father and his father's players. "My father had a gruff exterior-he was a former pro football player, a child of the Depression," Danowski says. "But those kids knew he cared about them and they greeted him with so much respect.. You become a compilation of everyone you've ever met-the sum total of all the people who have had influence in your life, good and bad."

Because of all of these things, Pressler has earned a reputation as a player's coach, whether it's deserved or not. He says he's not Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy, who, in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, said he never raised his voice at his players. He has imposed structure and responsibilities on his players; the team's 6:30 a.m. fall practices come to mind, as does his requirement that every player attend every class. The players are not allowed to wear hats in the building, and a one-handed scoop in practice earns the entire team some extra conditioning drills. "There's a certain way we want our players to behave," he says.

He requires players to do everything they can to be at practice, and will move the entire team's workout to accommodate one player who would otherwise need to miss practice for a job interview. One morning this winter, with the forecast calling for snow during the team's usual afternoon practice slot, Danowski text messaged his team to let them know that they would be practicing at 6 a.m., before the snow came. When they got out to the field, the lights weren't on, so they practiced in the parking lot until the sun came up at 7:30.

"I care about kids, if that makes me a player's coach than that's probably true," Danowski says. "It's not only the coach imposing some discipline, but the players actually having some discipline in their lives and wanting that to happen for them."

Danowski has transferred a lot of the responsibility for being disciplined to his players. Instead of imposing rules, he asks them to make good decisions for themselves. Though the players grumbled sometimes about the early practices in the fall, all of them came. And on their own, the team's seniors decided to have an alcohol-free preseason.

"Coach P[ressler] was sort of a throwback, old-school coach-it's sort of referred to as like a disciplinarian, but that sort of by implication means that Coach Dino's not, and that's not really true," Douglas says. "There's a structure and an intensity to [Danowski's] program."

This year's team has no lack of motivation. If they ever do start to drag, Danowski can just bring up the fact that one year ago, these same guys would have given anything just to practice one more time as a team. McDevitt says Danowski brings that idea up very infrequently, but that when he does, it really makes them stop and think.

Instead, Danowski and the team leaders worry about players trying to do too much on the field, putting too much pressure on themselves to do more on the lacrosse field than is possible. The coach worries that the players will try to prove their doubters wrong on the field, or that they'll try to win for their three indicted teammates. Every missed pass could become magnified into a missed opportunity to demonstrate their strong character. Every loss could be seen as a disappointment to their three martyred teammates. "My biggest fear is that everybody is going to judge them based upon what they do on the field," Danowski says. "And if they throw the ball away they're letting everybody down. Well, they're not letting anybody down-they just threw the ball away."

So he has tried to make practice and lacrosse a fun escape from everything else swirling around in the players' lives. And that is why he gives players hugs when he thinks they need it, and why he affixes an inspirational quote to the end of many of his e-mails, and why he reminds them every so often to focus on the present and to forget the past, at least while they're on the field.

"We want to be mindful of the past all the time," Danowski says. "But we can't dwell on it and we can't be upset by it, and we've got to keep moving forward."

Before the season, the players adopted as their motto "Succisa Virescit," a Latin phrase loosely translated as "Cut it down and it grows back stronger." The motto is printed the back of their t-shirts and on the banners around Koskinen Stadium. It is the one of the mottos of indicted player Reade Seligmann's beloved Delbarton School-Seligmann has it tattooed on his back. It, like the shooting shirts the players will wear with Seligmann's, Colin Finnerty's and David Evans' jersey numbers and the helmet stickers with Pressler's initials, is a nod to the past. It recalls the sadness and pain of last season, pain they are reminded of all the time.

But it is also a slogan that looks to the future, to the growing back. And with the leadership of their boisterous, hugging, Long Island coach, you'd be a fool to think Duke Lacrosse won't grow back stronger than it was before.