A week after tragedy, reeling Virginia lacrosse teams face challenge of focusing on NCAAs

Reeling Virginia teams now must prepare for NCAAs

The Virginia men’s and women’s lacrosse teams both anticipated playing for a national championship this month. They just never expected it to be like this.

Both teams awaited word of their NCAA tournament seedings Sunday night, a day after women’s player Yeardley Love was buried in her native Maryland. The 22-year-old was found beaten in her apartment earlier in the week and Charlottesville authorities have charged George Huguely of the men’s team with first-degree murder in her death.

Both teams decided to play on with the support of Love’s family.

The Cavaliers men’s team was given the top seed in the 16-team field. Appearing for the 17th time in coach Dom Starsia’s 18 seasons as coach, Virginia will host Mount St. Mary’s at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. It will not only be the first game for the team since the program was rocked by the slaying, but also since Starsia’s father died after a long illness on Friday.

The women’s pairings were to be announced after 10 p.m.

The tragic events leave both highly ranked squads having to find a way to put aside grief long enough to focus on competing in the tournament.

Few can understand the kind of attention that could follow Virginia’s teams through the NCAAs better than Duke coach John Danowski. He took over the Blue Devils’ program during the headline-grabbing, divisive rape investigation in 2006 and ‘07.

The false allegations ignited debates on race, class and athletic privilege at the elite university in Durham, N.C.

Danowski says the death of a student-athlete changes the dynamics between the Duke and UVA tragedies. And the UVA slaying happened so close to the NCAA tournament, just days before the Cavaliers will take the field again.

The Duke team had months to get accustomed to all the attention before falling by a goal to Johns Hopkins in the national championship game in Baltimore.

“We had eight months to process it and we had eight months to be together,” Danowski said. “I can’t tell you that there’s any similarity. … They’ve got to mourn.”

Danowski says that’s why he has not reached out to UVA men’s coach Dom Starsia.

The Duke scandal prompted the university to cancel the second half of the 2006 season and fire longtime coach Mike Pressler. It then followed the Blue Devils the entire next year, forcing Danowski to spend probably as much time counseling wounded players and trying to keep them talking about their feelings as he did preparing each game plan in his first season.

“I know that winning a game or losing a game — and I said this — didn’t make you a good person or a bad person,” Danowski said. “It just made you part of a team. Winning wasn’t going to make everything go away and losing wasn’t going to. It was just a game, for two hours in the afternoon.”

Playing won’t make things right again at Virginia. But at this point, it’s all they can do.

“The 70 remaining athletes have gone through so much in this short time … I have to believe that playing this out would almost be an act of catharsis,” said Robert Carpenter, a former player at Duke who founded Inside Lacrosse magazine after graduating in 1996.

That process has begun elsewhere, too.

Both Danowski and Maryland men’s coach Dave Cottle said they had met with their players last week to discuss Love’s death and Huguely’s arrest. As Cottle said, “I don’t think this is a lacrosse issue. This is a life issue.”

“I’ve been involved in lacrosse for 30 years and I’ve never heard anything like this,” Cottle said. “It’s devastating for all involved — for the families of course, and for the lacrosse community. You don’t want this to be the way lacrosse is being perceived.

“Hopefully, most people intelligently will look at it and say it was an individual act by an individual kid and not paint the whole sport with a brush.”

Carpenter said the Duke case ultimately galvanized a tight-knit lacrosse community, which has national reach but is concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions. He hopes the events at Virginia generates a similar show of support within the sport for a pair of reeling programs trying to focus on a game again.

“Life’s just been turned upside down for those at arm’s length from this incident,” Carpenter said, “let alone those closest to it.”

AP Sports Writer David Ginsburg in Baltimore contributed to this report.