Completed Event: Men's Lacrosse versus Georgetown on May 10, 2025 , Loss , 12, to, 16
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Final
Men's Lacrosse
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Trio Named Blue Devils of the Year by Blue Devil Weekly
7/12/2005 1:00:00 AM | Men's Lacrosse, Women's Golf, Women's Lacrosse
Duke sophomore and NCAA Champion Anna Grzebien, men's lacrosse sophomore and All-America Matt Danwoski and 2005 women's lacrosse player of the year and junior Katie Chrest all shared the Blue Devil Weekly's annual Blue Devil of the Year award for 2004-05. Past winners were Ali Curtis, women's soccer in 2000; Shane Battier, men's basketball and Candy Hanneman, women's golf in 2001; Jason Williams, men's basketball and Virada Nirapathpongporn, women's golf in 2002; Michael Yani, men's tennis and Alana Beard, women's basketball in 2003 and Chris Duhon, men's basketball and Alana Beard, women's basketball in 2004.
Anna Grzebien
Women's golf
Duke sophomore Anna Grzebien won the NCAA women's golf championship this May and hasn't played a round since.
Doctor's orders.
Grzebien competed with a torn tendon in her left wrist all season. Since the Blue Devils only had five players on the roster, she never got to rest it.
"It was just constant aggravation. It never had time to heal up," she reported last week.
Now there's time. After the NCAA tourney May 17-20, Grzebien stopped playing. The only tournament on her summer schedule is the U.S. Women's Amateur in early August. But the break hasn't been easy. She just resumed putting on June 23.
"I usually don't take more than two days off at a time and it's rare when I do that, so this is just not me," she said. "But I don't want to overdo it. I want to be ready for the season in the fall."
Unlike the pros, college golf is a team game in which the best squads need solid scores from four players every round to contend for titles. Duke has one of the most talented contingents in the country, but it's safe to say it probably wouldn't have claimed the 2005 NCAA team title if not for the efforts of Grzebien. The Blue Devils edged UCLA by five strokes for the championship. Grzebien's 6-under-par 65 in the third round, the best score posted in the four-day event, differentiated her team from the rest of the field.
Then she fired a 73 the final round to finish 2-over par for the tourney, one stroke ahead of runnerup Leah Wigger of Virginia. She became the Blue Devils' third individual champion, joining Candy Hannemann and Virada Nirapathpongporn, at the same time the school won its third team title. A few days later, Grzebien was named winner of the Honda Award, signifying national player of the year status in her sport.
It was the culmination of strong season, leading to Grzebien's selection as one of BDW's Blue Devils of the year. Although she was considered the third best player on her team, she was at her best in the biggest events.
Two weeks before the NCAA nationals, Grzebien won her first college trophy at the NCAA regionals, finishing four shots ahead of teammate Brittany Lang and eight in front of Liz Janangelo. A month before that, Grzebien took second place at the ACC Tournament, just one shot behind teammate Lang and four ahead of Janangelo. All five Blue Devils placed in the top eight as Duke won the conference team title for the 10th year in a row.
At both regionals and nationals, Grzebien got hot at the perfect time. In the regionals, she entered the final round five shots off the pace but fired a 67 to storm to the front. At nationals, she was tied for 17th place at the end of the second day before the 65 vaulted her ? and her team ? to the top of the leaderboard.
Duke coach Dan Brooks recognized the potential of his spirited Rhode Island product long ago. Now everyone else knows what she can do.
"If she had anything left to prove to herself, she has done it," he said. "She now believes in herself and now she can start playing golf at a level where she belongs.
"She needed these past wins to convince herself that she is at the upper echelon of women's golf, which means a great deal to our golf team, to have another player ranked among the best."
"It was really a great feeling to do it as an individual and a team all at once. It was pretty overwhelming," Grzebien said. "I learned a lot about myself and coming together as a team, and I think next year the people who are returning will be able to use that experience.
"That's probably the most pressure-filled tournament there is because everyone who gets there plays to win. I think we all handled it well, we all chipped in when we needed to and we came out on top. We'll work toward that again next year."
The cold, rainy, windy conditions in Sunriver, Ore., were far from ideal for Grzebien's aching wrist. When better weather unfolded the third day, Grzebien felt that was the round to take advantage. Her career-best 65 was the result.
"I started out with a bogey," she recounted. "I two-putted my first hole, but I just didn't let it faze me. I birdied the next hole and everything came together. I was very focused on staying in the present and was just rolling the ball really well, putting great. I putted well throughout the week, but everything just fell into place that round."
The weather deteriorated again the last day, but not Grzebien's approach. She absorbed Brooks' message to remain patient and not get ahead of herself, and she placed a call to her swing coach back home. "He told me I had to put a good round behind me just like you do a bad round, and concentrate on the task at hand. I did that and took it shot-for-shot and hole-for-hole."
Also back home in Rhode Island were several other interested parties. Her father Tom got her started in the game with junior golf lessons at the age of five, and her two older sisters, both of whom played at Northwestern, practically forced her to keep up with them. Lauren graduated last year and is working for an investment banking firm in New York, while Mary Ellen graduated last month and is headed to law school.
"My dad wanted he and my sisters and I to have something in common, something we could always do together," said Grzebien, who has spent many an hour with her siblings and father at Point Judith Country Club in their hometown of Narragansett. "Having two older sisters, they were really good junior players and they pushed me to beat them.
"When I was younger I couldn't hit it as far as them, so it just pushed me to work that much harder. We were very competitive and kind of fed off each other. Then we started playing AJGA tournaments and it went from there."
There is now the top of the college golf world for Grzebien ? and she still has two years remaining.
Matt Danowski
Men's lacrosse
A road trip to Hofstra had become a staple on the Duke lacrosse schedule in recent seasons, but the series is now in remission because of a recruit.
Two years ago, one of the best prep players in the nation was down to Duke and Hofstra. He picked the Blue Devils, so the Hofstra coach decided he didn't want to play Duke for awhile.
There was no bad blood involved, however. Hofstra's coach, John Danowski, happens to be the father of the coveted recruit.
"My dad's coached there 22 years, longer than I've been around," Duke sophomore Matt Danowski said the other day. "I was always around lacrosse growing up, always at practice. There was never any pressure to play, but it was something I picked up and enjoyed doing, and I've been doing it since I was 4 or 5 years old.
"I took a (recruiting) visit there, but I knew what it was like. I knew in my own head what I wanted to do. It came down to Duke and Hofstra and I just did what I thought was best for myself in the future. Duke's just a better situation for me academically and lacrosse-wise, and it's working out."
Danowski's father left most of the nuts-and-bolts recruiting to his staff in this case. "He was more of a dad than a coach," Matt said. "He told me to look for my future more than right now. So that's what I did, and I came to Duke."
Duke's Mike Pressler was one of the coaches who viewed Danowski as perhaps the top prospect in the nation. The recruiting battle was an important one for him to win, even if it did mean a temporary end to his team's annual trek to lacrosse-fertile territory on Long Island.
Though just a second-year player, Danowski was a prime force behind the Blue Devils' best lacrosse season ever in 2005. The team won a Division I record 17 games, was ranked No. 2 in the nation most of the year and reached the NCAA championship before falling to top-ranked Johns Hopkins in a one-goal thriller.
Duke led the nation in scoring thanks to a plethora of weapons in the first line attack and midfield. Danowski, though, was the Devils' top point producer and he also led the nation in scoring with 92 points on 50 goals and 42 assists.
Danowski received the Lt. Col. J.I. Turnbull Award as the outstanding attackman in Division I, an honor presented by the U.S. Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association. He also earned first team All-America honors, was the ACC player of the year, made the ACC and NCAA all-tournament teams and was a finalist for the Tewaaraton Trophy, which goes to the national player of the year.
Because of his impact nationally as well as at Duke, Danowski was selected BDW's male Blue Devil of the year for 2005.
Duke lacrosse had a healthy run going a few years ago with six straight NCAA bids and back-to-back ACC titles in 2001 and 2002. But the Devils missed the tournament the last two years with records of 8-7 and 5-8, making their 2005 resurgence one of the feel-good stories of the year in Duke athletics. The highlights were many ? a 17-3 record, an ACC regular season championship secured with a rout of Virginia before a capacity home crowd, and a resounding win over Maryland in the NCAA semifinals. The only three defeats were to Maryland in the ACC Tournament championship contest and a pair of knock-down, drag-outs with Johns Hopkins.
"We were really young my freshman year, with all freshmen and sophomores playing," Danowski said of Duke's losing record in 2004. "We needed more experience. This year we had more experience and played with more confidence. We knew we could be good and we played like we were good. We showed a lot more confidence than we did my freshman year."
The NCAA title match offered the best setting ever for Duke lacrosse: a nationally televised contest on Memorial Day featuring the top two teams in the country before an exceptional crowd. Attendance at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia was 44,920 ? the largest audience on record for an NCAA lacrosse championship game. Danowski said the crowd was deafening.
Danowski had two goals and four assists to help the Devils open up an 8-6 lead in the third quarter, before the Blue Jays blanked Duke the rest of the way and rallied for a 9-8 win.
"When we went up 8-6 we maybe played a little more conservatively than we usually do and got a little tight probably," said Danowski, who took Duke's last shot of the season with just under four minutes to play.
"And we didn't shoot well. We had shots, we just didn't shoot well. We started shooting low when we should have been shooting high. We just got a little tight and conservative, just like we did when we were beating them at their place during the year. From that we need to learn not to get so uptight when we go up in a big game. We need to play with what got us there."
Danowski respected the effectiveness of Hopkins' overall team defense, especially in light of the fact that most opponents had difficulty dealing with the Blue Devils and all their offensive weapons. While Danowski found the back of the net quite often, he could also act as playmaker and feed the ball to standouts such as Dan Flannery, Zack Greer and midfielder Peter Lamade. Danowski credits Duke's talent pool for much of the personal recognition he's received.
"One of the good things about this year was that we were so diverse, and nobody was selfish," he said. "Everyone wanted the ball but nobody was selfish about it. That was probably the key to our success, the unselfish play we had, the one more pass we always did. That definitely helped."
Danowski, in Durham for summer school, says he hasn't yet watched a videotape of the national final, but thinking about it leaves him with a taste of unfinished business.
"It still stays in my head that we went up 8-6 and had an opportunity to win the game and couldn't put it away," he noted. "But we're still a young team, and it hurts to say it, but this whole season was a learning experience for us really. It was great to play in the national championship game, but our goal was to win it, not just play in it. So we have something to work for next year."
Katie Chrest
Women's lacrosse
The Duke women's lacrosse team just enjoyed the best season in the brief history of its program. But it is next year that could be the most important season in the eyes of star attacker Katie Chrest.
Not because it will be her senior year, but because it will offer the Blue Devils a chance to establish some staying power on the national scene in a fast-growing sport.
Competing in just its 10th year as a varsity sport, the 2005 Duke team won the ACC Tournament for the first time and reached the final four for the second time before bowing out to conference rival Virginia. If Chrest has her way, those accomplishments won't stand alone but will set a tone for the program's future.
Duke's first final four trip came in 1999, in the program's fourth year of existence. The Blue Devils haven't exactly struggled since then, with NCAA bids and high national rankings every year. But neither have they joined Princeton, Maryland and some of the other traditional powers when it comes time to round up the usual suspects for the final four each May.
It's time for that to change, says Chrest.
"The Duke program grew so fast. It was really successful early on in its history," she noted. "The last three or four years have been really hard and people have been hard on our program.
"With the exception of Northwestern, most teams that win national championships, like Princeton and Maryland, they've been around. I knew we had the reputation of a team that had the talent but never got it done. This year I think we proved we're serious and we're going to get it done. That's why winning the ACC and getting to the final four were so important.
"In '99 they went to the final four and we didn't get back until now. This time I want it to be like we're starting over again and let's keep it going. We want ACC championships two or three in a row, that kind of thing.
"Everyone on our team understood how special this year was and what needs to be done to keep it that way. That's the cool thing. We only lose five people, so we've got 25 returning who know how a team works well together."
Chrest will be the most decorated returnee. She closed her junior year by winning the Tewaaraton Trophy, the lacrosse equivalent of football's Heisman. She also was named the national attacker of the year, the ACC player of the year and the ACC Tournament MVP. Her league-leading totals of 70 goals, 96 points and 162 shots helped make Duke the No. 3 offense in the country.
During a season of many remarkable accomplishments across the board, Chrest stood out as one of BDW's annual Blue Devils of the year.
This was Chrest's third straight year as the leading scorer for coach Kerstin Kimel's team, but it was significantly better than the other two. This was the year she learned how to focus more on the team and let the game come to her. Talks with her coach and a sports psychologist helped unlock one of the secrets of success as Chrest came to grips with the pressure of great expectations that had bothered her the year before.
"I felt no pressure this year, a lot less than I did last year or the year before," Chrest said upon her recent return from a World Cup trial. "That says a lot about the people around you. I had so much confidence in the people I was working with that it took so much off my shoulders.
"When I went out there, my worries were not about me. When I struggled, it was about getting us to work together better. I took the focus off myself this year and it relieved a lot of pressure. I was able to just go out and play and have a great time.
"I always knew if I stopped worrying about myself I would play better. I guess that goes for every athlete. So I really worked on it for the whole year."
The Blue Devils set a school record for victories with 17 and were ranked as high as No. 2 in the country, behind undefeated Northwestern. A loss to Virginia in the final four was a downer, after Duke had beaten the Cavs twice before, but winning the ACC Tournament for the first time was a pivotal achievement. The Devils had been blasted by UVa in the 2004 conference final.
"We knew we needed to climb that hurdle and get over that hump first, before we could look on to the final four or anything else," Chrest explained. "In my heart that's something I really wanted for our program and for Kerstin and for us. After that, we knew how to win and we knew what it felt like to win a championship. That was really key.
"Obviously we wanted to win the whole thing, but it was absolutely necessary that we made some of the strides we made this year first. I think we had an unbelievable season, and it wasn't just everything we did on the field. It's amazing to see that when you are successful, how things off the field come together as well as on the field. Things just seemed to go our way all year.
"It's hard to look back and not be disappointed right away, but then you realize we did so much this year and accomplished a lot. I'm really proud of that."
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