Lacrosse’s Path to National Growth Runs Through North Carolina

These excerpts from the new book, The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse are published with permission from Atlantic Monthly Press. 

In the mid-1970s, a buddy playing on our school’s new, short-lived lacrosse club passed on a battered hybrid stick—wood shaft, plastic head—and a ball. I had no real idea what to do with them.

Youth sports in my Connecticut city revolved around Pop Warner football, basketball, Little League baseball, and pond hockey, and their pro versions dominated weekend TV. Lacrosse’s nearest enclaves, in tony Greenwich and New Canaan, might as well have been 500 miles away; I had never seen any field with lacrosse players on it, let alone one where they kept score.

Still, at 14, I liked the smooth, beveled grain on my palms, the way the hard-rubber ball rocketed off walls and garage doors, and I ran miles at night rocking a rudimentary cradle—the metronomic wrist-action that keeps the ball settled. Eventually lacrosse got tossed onto a heap of discarded teen obsessions, along with yo-yos, wrestling, skateboarding, and comic books.

I couldn’t know that something about it had lodged, like a splinter from that thirdhand wood, under the skin. Or that, over the years, it would keep working its way out.

The first time came in spring of 1981. I had just been accepted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That May, the Tar Heels upset mighty Johns Hopkins University to win their first lacrosse national championship, a shocker: Even the uninitiated knew Hopkins as the sport’s New York Yankees, a 39-time champion whose aura made every other program seem second-rate.

UNC’s feat clearly meant something, and—as if to emphasize the point—at the end of my first year, the Tar Heels met Hopkins in the 1982 NCAA final and won again. Still, coming after the campus emptied and long before we returned in the fall, the back-to-back titles had a spectral quality, and there was bigger game afoot. UNC football was ranked in the nation’s top five. Legendary basketball coach Dean Smith had won his first NCAA title. A freshman named Michael Jordan hit the winning shot.

There was no UNC women’s lacrosse team then. The men’s roster was all white, and its opponents looked no different. Like fraternities and the martini-soaked lunch, the whole scene seemed easily dismissible, a niche pastime edging toward anachronism. I was sure that only mass American spectacles like baseball, football, boxing, basketball, and tennis really mattered. In the friction and friendships crackling between Black and white and brown in those sports, charged by TV money and the obsessive attention of millions, one could even glimpse the nation painfully—sometimes gloriously—working through its issues. Lacrosse seemed only about itself.

Breaking Boundaries

By the late 1980s, lacrosse’s first pioneer power, the template for every far-flung program to come, had risen 300 miles south of Baltimore in Chapel Hill. Its mastermind was a Hopkins guy. Willie Scroggs played midfield for three straight national championship teams from 1967 to 1969 (and was an all-conference defensive back in football) and, during a six-year run as an assistant coach, won two more. But, with an air of Zen cockiness and an upbringing—and name—straight out of Dickens, he was also like nothing Hopkins had ever seen.

Scroggs was raised in the rowhouse neighborhood of Waverly in inner-city Baltimore. His grandfather was a boxer known as “Handsome Harry.” His Japanese mother, Helen, already had two sons when she met his father, Willard, an Army military police officer at Pearl Harbor during World War II. Willard returned to Baltimore and became a corrupt and alcoholic cop. In 1953, five months after being accused of extorting hush money from a numbers runner, he was fired from the Baltimore Police Department for shaking down an 82-year-old pharmacist for $3,000.

The program he inherited at Chapel Hill in 1978 was a Bizarro World version of Hopkins; a player revolt against previous head coach Paul Doty had resulted in 14 suspensions, 11 reinstatements, and no sign that men’s lacrosse could ever thrive. UNC lacrosse had already died once, in 1954, and its resurrection 20 years later had done little to spark interest on campus or around the state. 

Not one high school in North Carolina played lacrosse. Scholarships at UNC were being slashed from 13 to 9. And because head lacrosse coach wasn’t a full-time position, come off-season Scroggs worked as assistant business manager in the athletic department, in charge of tickets, security and fire marshals at Tar Heel home football and basketball games.

None of that slowed him. Soon after arriving, Scroggs headed back north, intent on larceny. His alma mater and the University of Maryland had long divvied up the best Baltimore recruits, with cost no factor; though it didn’t offer “athletic scholarships,” Hopkins’ system of targeted aid erased tuition bills for top talents. But with a beautiful campus and starting positions to dangle, in 1979 alone Scroggs picked off five of the Baltimore Sun’s 12-man All-Metro first team.

“With one or two more recruiting years like that,” said the Evening Sun, “Scroggs will soon have UNC at the top.” The next year, he poached Baltimore area Player of the Year Andy Smith; by 1981, 17 Baltimore stars had migrated to Chapel Hill. 

Scroggs allowed players freedom but not selfishness. His noted reserve, accentuated by a full beard and thick glasses, kept people off-balance. He liked that. 

“I’ve never met anybody like Willie,” said goalie Tom Sears, who often found himself alone with Scroggs at the UNC training table. “I’d sit and have lunch with him for 20 minutes, and neither one of us would say a word. Nothing. You know how unnerving that is as a sophomore, and it’s your coach, and you’re thinking, Should I say something—should I NOT say something? But when he did say something, it was usually pretty profound. I’ve never had a better coach.”

He was the man who had broken lacrosse’s boundaries, taken down the sport’s giant. “Hopkins was the mecca,” said former UNC player—and Baltimore native—Peter Voelkel. “They were the best. It was great satisfaction to know that we didn’t go the traditional route. We took our risk, and we beat ’em. And I really do believe that was the start of the growth outside the traditional Virginia, Cornell, Maryland, Hopkins. Who even thought about North Carolina in lacrosse? Our success propelled the game to grow its footprint. Willie is the architect.”

“It never seemed to leave Maryland,” said former Syracuse coach Roy Simmons Jr. of the game then. “It never went west, until Willie went down to Carolina and started it there, then it spread and now, my God, it’s coast to coast and north to south and Canada.”

A Hedge Against Laxbro Entitlement

The U.S. men’s team isolated itself for the 2018 World Championship at Shefayim Kibbutz in Herzliya, Israel. Clearly, Team USA found the accommodations agreeable. The Americans went undefeated in their first six games, including a 14-5 pasting of Australia in the semifinals that ensured another showdown with Canada. 

More important, their gritty cohesion stood in marked contrast to the whiny persona of the second-place finishers in 2014, an upgrade due almost entirely to the touch of John Danowski.

At that point, the 64-year-old head coach didn’t need a world title to confirm his status as one of the game’s all-timers. Winner of three NCAA championships at Duke and a participant in nine Final Fours, Danowski notched his 376th victory in 2017 to pass Dom Starsia and become the career Division I leader. 

In March 2006, what became known as the “Duke lacrosse case” erupted: Three white members of the men’s team were accused of raping a Black stripper at a team party. Eventually, the players were declared innocent by the state’s attorney general. But amid the debacle, with the sport’s image flambeed daily, Danowski assumed control of a program with arguably the highest—and worst—national profile in lacrosse history. 

He spent the next decade providing a one-man hedge against depictions of laxbro entitlement, real and exaggerated, and a template for handling its ills. His 2015 appointment to Team USA was as much an endorsement of who Danowski is as of what he does.

“One of the best men you’ll ever meet,” said USA attackman Jordan Wolf, a four-time All-American and 2014 Duke graduate. “He knows how to make you a better person, and as I go on in my business career or family life, I’ll always turn to him for advice. He’s just so big on doing the right thing, even things that are so little.”

For Danowski, seeking the Duke job in the summer of 2006 made perfect sense. Parents and players trusted him like no other outsider: His son, Matt, was then a junior attackman for Duke. Like them, Danowski had raged and worried that his son would be randomly accused; like them, he had stressed over the prospect of huge legal bills. 

Meanwhile, in 2006 the native Long Islander managed the greatest season in his 21-year coaching career at Hofstra, reaching an unprecedented No. 2 ranking amid dizzying highs and lows. After one win, he chased a camera crew asking about the Duke scandal out of the building. Every few days he knelt in a back pew at St. Kilian’s church in Farmingdale, praying “that it would all go away.”

For Duke, the job description was more amorphous. The three accused players wouldn’t be exonerated for months, and the stain from the team’s otherwise racist and boorish remarks showed no sign of fading. For the first time, officials tacitly acknowledged that the sport’s norms—and even more, its popular image as rich, entitled and wedded to alcohol—were serious dangers. Danowski sat for an interview with Duke’s search committee and was peppered with questions about team culture, off-field behavior, discipline. No one asked about recruiting or even lacrosse.

In time, it would become obvious that his predecessor, Mike Pressler (who went on to coach Team USA to a redemptive World Championship in 2010), had been unfairly forced out. But the goal was change for change’s sake, and it was instantly clear to Duke officials that Danowski offered a break from Pressler’s hard-charging style. It helped, too, that Danowski was the first coaching candidate, in any sport, to show familiarity with Duke’s course catalogue and had a master’s degree in counseling and college student development. “We needed more of a guidance counselor, at that point, than a coach,” said Duke goalie Devon Sherwood. “He was like our team rabbi.”

Keeping the Duke players in line, socially, was easy that first 2007 season. Duke won 17 games and surged to the 2007 national championship game before losing, 12-11, to Johns Hopkins. Though Danowski stressed all year that winning couldn’t provide redemption, he knew his players felt it would be the perfect answer to all their critics. “I wanted to deliver that for them,” he said. “I did feel like I failed.”

Scars remain. Danowski hates how the rape accusations made his son Matt forever suspect adult authority—professors, administrators, media, parents. But he understands: In those first years, aside from interim athletic director Chris Kennedy, he said, “We trusted no one.” In the fall of 2008, a Duke vice president phoned to say that Matt had been seen throwing a beer during a tailgate at a Duke football game. Danowski’s son was on crutches, nursing a foot injury. Danowski procured security camera footage: A beer was seen flying over Matt’s head, but his son had thrown nothing.

Ever since, the reputation of Duke lacrosse has been pristine. There have been no reports of criminal acts or heinous excess. But the mistrust of his bosses endures.

“That person still works there,” Danowski said of the vice president when we spoke in Israel. “So I’m still leery because I hear the stories—and I don’t hear half of it. But we work really hard not to give them any ammunition—and they have none on us. I mean, they’ve got none.”

A Better Strain of Lacrosse Culture

The Duke rape saga and the 2010 killing of University of Virginia player Yeardley Love by her former boyfriend, a UVa men’s lacrosse player, cemented the idea of “lacrosse culture” and fueled public chatter about its worst excesses. The steadying presence of a coach like John Danowski couldn’t alter that. Players are lacrosse’s lifeblood. Only players themselves could reset a popular image gone seriously askew.

Casey Carroll, whose epic All-American career as a Duke defenseman encompassed the program’s fall and revival and triumph, didn’t set out to reveal a better strain of lacrosse culture. In the spring of 2006, he was one of the 46 Blue Devils asked to give DNA samples to Durham police. Carroll, a junior, wasn’t too worried. Out for the season with a knee injury, he had spent the night of the party with his girlfriend, Erin Hathorn, a Duke soccer player from Durham. On March 23, he and his teammates entered a Durham police lab with jackets over their heads to hide from a news photographer. He was swabbed in the mouth, stood shirtless during a fruitless search for fresh bruises or scratches. 

Though the first in his family to go to college, Carroll didn’t seem unusual then. Seventeen of his teammates also came from Long Island, and three others were sons of firemen. He rehabbed his knee and rebounded in 2007 with the best season of his career, anchored Duke’s redemption campaign—capped by its one-goal loss to Johns Hopkins in the NCAA final—and was named first-team All-American. He graduated with a degree in history and visual arts, and glittering options. An extra year of eligibility, granted by the NCAA because of the cancellation of the 2006 season, offered another run at a title. Lacrosse’s lucrative job network dangled a good job in finance.

Instead, Carroll—at the height of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—enlisted in the Army. He wasn’t looking to make a statement. Serving was always the intent. 

Though the sport is often linked with words like “entitlement,” lacrosse’s embrace of military values like self-sacrifice, duty and honor rivals—perhaps even exceeds—that of any other sport. This stems, in part, from the service academies’ early success; from 1932 until 1971, when the NCAA held its first lacrosse tournament, the Naval Academy and West Point, along with Johns Hopkins and Maryland, dominated the college game. 

Their postgraduate commitments, of course, ensure that all Navy, Army, and Air Force players end up in uniform. But military tradition also runs deep in civilian schools. Of the eight Duke players who entered the military during Danowski’s first 11 years, three became SEALs, three Marines, and one an Army Ranger. 

The one player Carroll most identified with was Army Sgt. Jimmy Regan. A fellow Long Islander from Manhasset and Chaminade High, the Duke midfielder graduated in 2002 and turned down a job with financial services giant UBS and a law school scholarship at Southern Methodist University to enlist. 

“If I don’t do it,” he asked his fiancée, “who will do it?” Regan then passed on Officer Candidate School to become a Ranger, machine gunner and fire team leader, and served two deployments apiece in Afghanistan and Iraq. The two men never met. Just before his senior season, early in 2007, Carroll acquired Regan’s contact information, but Regan went overseas before they could speak. On February 9, he was killed on patrol in northern Iraq after an improvised explosive device ignited near his vehicle. He was 26.

Within minutes of hearing the news, Carroll decided to enlist. Ten weeks later, Duke hosted Army, and Regan’s parents—James and Mary—and fiancée attended the game in Durham with members of his platoon. 

During his four-and-a-half-year hitch, Carroll hit all of Regan’s marks—the four  deployments, the 60-day Ranger School gantlet of even more intense training to become a team leader, the rank of sergeant and fire team leader. During his tours of Iraq in 2008 and Afghanistan in 2009, 2010 and 2011, his platoon raided terrorist strongholds and destroyed many; during a two-month stretch in 2010, the 3rd Battalion suffered men killed and wounded daily. Carroll was never injured, but friends died.

On the afternoon of May 31, 2010, Memorial Day, when Danowski and Duke won their first national championship by beating Notre Dame 6-5, in Baltimore, Carroll was 10 time zones east at Sharana, a well-outfitted forward operating base set on a rise in southeastern Afghanistan, resting between missions. He stayed up through the night in a recreation room tracking the game on a community computer, constantly hitting refresh on the ESPN webpage.

He had no thought, then, of playing lacrosse again. He didn’t pick up a stick for nearly five years. But by the time Carroll mustered out in February 2012, he had canvassed Duke coaches and administrators: Military service preserved his original extra year of NCAA eligibility. 

In the fall of 2012, Carroll began classes full-time at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, paid for by the GI Bill and the supplemental Yellow Ribbon program, and by Erin’s earnings as an elementary school teacher. She gave birth to their first child, Patrick, that September. Carroll was 27. The practice field was across the street from class; his teammates called him “Old Man.” 

Those first months, Carroll got by on muscle memory and wondered if his timing and quickness would ever return. Then in January, two weeks before Duke’s 2013 season opener—and just minutes after realizing, “I got it. I’m back”—he planted his left foot during a one-on-one drill, turned, and blew out the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee. His season was over. 

Carroll spent the 2013 season rehabbing and, once again, missed playing on a national championship winner when Duke picked up its second NCAA title. The injury had created yet another season of eligibility, but an intense summer internship with Wells Fargo in Charlotte undercut his fitness, and the final year of grad school ate up energy and time. Erin, then pregnant with their second child, asked the obvious: Maybe time to hang it up?

“But at the end of the day, she was so supportive,” Carroll said. “Millions of former athletes out there say, ‘What I would do for one more day out there with the guys …’ If the opportunity’s there to do something special, why give that up?”

On February 8, 2014—a decade after first enrolling at Duke, and 2,447 days since his last collegiate game—Carroll, then 29, ran out in Duke’s Koskinen Stadium for the season opener against Jacksonville. The Blue Devils won. He played nearly every minute, led the defense with five groundballs and forced three turnovers, and was named ACC Defensive Player of the Week.

Carroll never did regain that full confidence. His knee ached. A hip flexor injury slowed him. He was usually the team’s third-best defenseman. But he started all but one of 18 regular-season games as Duke went 15-3.

Injuries, military, age, circumstance: There was nobody in American sports like him. During Duke’s run to the 2014 national championship game in Baltimore, Carroll’s 10-year odyssey became a dominant, tidy and—with the final set for Memorial Day—irresistible storyline. “Perhaps no one,” said the Baltimore Sun, “would fit better on Monday’s stage than Carroll.”

And then the impossible happened: Seven years after losing his seeming last shot at an NCAA title, the 29-year-old former Army Ranger came back to the same field and won, anchoring the Duke defense in an 11-9 victory over Notre Dame.

Carroll’s first reaction was typical: He wasn’t happy with his play. For his entire athletic life, he had felt detached from any result. Now, after all he’d seen and lived, how could a game really matter? He hugged teammates and wandered about seeking a feeling that wouldn’t come, even after picking up his two sons in the emptying grass. Then, on the field, Carroll saw Jimmy Regan’s parents. He still can’t talk about this without choking up.

“Hugging them … they are always so special,” he said. “My path had obviously been so parallel to his, and I can’t ever fully appreciate the size of the heart it takes to have that—but they never made me feel, in any way, that I needed to do anything for their benefit or their son. But he’s the reason I became a Ranger. 

“And holding my kids there, and now having that perspective of being a father myself …  it’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Seeing the strength that they carried through: That’s where the cracks started forming in the walls I’d built up.”

S.L. Price, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 26 years. He is the author of five books.