Duke eyes league crown
(04/27/05 4:00am)
After the best regular season in team history, Duke begins the postseason this weekend at the ACC Championships in Baltimore, Md.
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After the best regular season in team history, Duke begins the postseason this weekend at the ACC Championships in Baltimore, Md.
BALTIMORE — In the end, the only people left at Homewood Field were a television crew quietly packing their gear and a group of Duke fans, mostly the players’ families, on the other side of the stadium. The din of the nearby Johns Hopkins group emanated from inside the locker room.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>When Duke plays Johns Hopkins tonight in their much-anticipated matchup of the country’s top two teams, it will be yet another huge game for the perennially top-ranked Blue Jays, who last week beat then-No. 2 Virginia. For the Blue Devils, however, the game will mean a little bit more. A win against JHU—8-2 all-time against Duke—would be only the second win against a No. 1 team in the Blue Devils’ history. The Blue Devils would become the No. 1 team in the country for the first time ever, extend their record undefeated streak and likely guarantee themselves a bye in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. “It’s the biggest regular season game in the history of our program,” Duke head coach Mike Pressler said. “We will just leave it at that.” Perhaps most important for Pressler is the exposure his team will get just by showing up at Homewood Field. Anywhere from 7,000 to 10,000 fans are expected for the game, which will be broadcast nationally on ESPN’s college sports channel, ESPNU. From all accounts, it will be the biggest crowd a Duke team has ever played against in the regular season. And although Pressler would never say it, it would mean a whole lot for his team to post a good showing—against Johns Hopkins, the most storied program in the country, on the most hallowed field in the cradle of the lacrosse world, Baltimore. “Like I said to the guys, it’s two teams having great regular seasons to date,” Presser said. “Our goal was never to be No. 1 in the poll. Just like it was never to be undefeated. Certainly we are going to have fun with the game. “Hopkins certainly has its own pressure. Their home-game streak [is] on the line.” The buzz, which has surrounded Pressler and his team in 2005, was certainly not present in 2002 and 2003. Pressler watched the two best players from his 2002 squad transfer after the season and heard the criticisms of his coaching and his program that accompanied the departures. The following year’s team was the first Pressler squad to not make the NCAA’s since 1996. Last year’s team went 5-8, the worst record of any Pressler-coached Duke team ever. One of those transfers, attackman Matt Rekowski, now starts for the Blue Jays. Tonight he may run into Duke midfielder Kyle Dowd, who is in his first year with the Blue Devils since transferring from Hopkins. The program Rekowski and Matt Monfett, who now plays at Loyola, left behind was a nationally established one, albeit not a serious contender for the national championship year in and year out. Under the direction of Pressler, the Blue Devils have been a consistent top-10 team. They made the Final Four in 1997, beating a Hopkins team in overtime in the quarterfinals. From 1997 to 2002, Duke went to six straight NCAA tournaments and won two ACC championships. In addition, in that time Duke’s facilities, including its weight room, practice field and Koskinen Stadium were renovated and improved. In addition, the administration fully funded the team, bringing the number of team scholarships to 12.6, the number the rest of the ACC teams have given for years, Pressler said. “For all those years, we were behind,” Pressler said. “The Marylands, Hopkins, Virginias had more. Now we are dead even.... I’ve seen them all. Nobody has a better facility and a better situation than us now. “We can get to the point now that we can recruit to the very best players.” The recruits who Pressler has built the team around are the sophomore and junior classes, who make up all but two of the team’s starters. Quicker and better stick handlers, they are a different kind of players than the Blue Devils of the 1990s, who were known more for their size than speed. In 2005 Matt Danowski, Duke’s best attackman, is listed at 5-foot-9, 190 pounds. Starting defenseman Casey Carroll goes 6-foot-2, 175 pounds. By comparison, Terrence Keaney, a midfielder who graduated in 2002, went 6-foot-5, 220 pounds. “They used to look like the Green Bay Packers,” said Virginia coach Dom Starsia, whose team faces Duke next weekend. “[The Blue Devils are] not quite as big as they used to be. I certainly think it’s one of the faster, quicker Duke teams I’ve seen in a long time. “You would have to ask Coach Pressler if that was a willful transformation or a process of recruiting.”
WASHINGTON — The only scary moment for Duke Saturday came when a Georgetown defender unloaded an afternoon’s frustration as he hit the Blue Devils’ Michael Ward from behind. Ward lay on the ground but popped up to his feet a few seconds later and jogged back to his teammates, who yelled their approval in the direction of Georgetown’s bench.
After two frustrating years, Duke’s midseason report shows the program is back on track. In fact, the team is off to its best start since 1998.
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Before his team took the field against third-ranked Maryland, Duke men’s lacrosse coach Mike Pressler told his players if they were going to win, it was going to be close.
When important people in our lives move on, those of us who were affected by them tend to reflect. After all, it is during this period when we decide how we will remember our heroes. Witness the goodwill extended to President Reagan last summer and all things written about Hunter S. Thompson the last several weeks.
For most of the late 1990s, Duke’s men’s lacrosse team was one of the best in the country. With consistent top-10 rankings, frequent appearances in the later stages of the NCAA Tournament and plenty of players on the All-ACC honor roll, head coach Mike Pressler was in charge of one of the healthiest programs around.
So Duke's run through basketball fantasy land finally ended last night. Hey, we all knew it couldn't last. Thanks to the terps, its wave goodbye to that unbelievable No. 2 ranking.
“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”
CAIRO, Egypt — There might be more than one leadership with global impact that ends this week. (The election was still undecided at the time of writing.) In addition to the possible leadership switch in the White House, two other world leaders may be on their way out: Yasser Arafat and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
CAIRO, Egypt—From over here it looks like the PSM conference went off pretty well. Hopefully, people already passionate on the subject learned something new and newcomers came to realize that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most important issue in the most important region in the world for Americans today. Please don’t forget: What happens over there today will affect what happens here tomorrow. The perpetrators of Sept. 11 drew a lot of their anger from what the Israelis and Palestinians are doing to each other and al Qaeda’s new recruits will continue to do so.
CAIRO, Egypt—Back when television cartoons were a bigger part of my life, there was a program called G.I. Joe. Joe and co. were a bunch of tough military men whose primary objective in life was to save the world from the evil Team Cobra. Who was good and was bad? There was never any question. Team Cobra was out for world domination and Joe was the “real American hero,” as the theme song went. Accordingly, at the end of every episode there was a public service announcement on safety—how to call an ambulance or how to avoid drinking poison. “And knowing,” the G.I. Joe team member would say at the end the show, “is half the battle.”
CAIRO, Egypt — Sept. 11 passed by here in Egypt recently. For all intents and purposes it was just another day, which made me wonder—what do Egyptians really think of America? Is this a country full of our friends? Or have our policies turned most of Egypt’s 70-odd million people against us?
CAIRO, Egypt—Ahh, the start of a new school year. Like baseball’s spring training, people report in hopefully decent physical shape, every team is still undefeated and the facilities just look great.
WASHINGTON -- Her team just blew a double-digit lead and lost again, which makes it four losses now to go with those two wins. So as she sits her in locker room, it would be understandable if Alana Beard began to cry. Or scream. Or try to click her Nikes and ask to be sent back to Duke.
What was at stake this weekend for the men's lacrosse team, who entered its game against Virginia with more losses than wins (4-6, 0-3 in the ACC)?
Matt Danowski plays attack for Duke, a Division I lacrosse program, and that means he spends most of the game being marked by large defenders playing with six-foot poles made from the same material used in fighter jets and dispositions not unlike an angry rottweiler.
The men's lacrosse team was one second and one bounce away from resurrecting its season Saturday.
As the men's lacrosse team wrapped up practice up yesterday, somebody quipped "it's not who the best team is, it's who the best team is between 1 and 3 on Saturday."