(Photo Credit: John Strohsacker)
by Chris Detwiler
Duke University men’s lacrosse head coach John Danowski is one of the most respected lacrosse coaches in the world. His accolades exceed those of any other lacrosse coach in history.
In his 12 years at Duke, he has led the Blue Devils to five national championship appearances, including three championship victories, and has won the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) regular season seven times while leading his team to four ACC tournament wins.
With a career record of 402-195, he is the winningest coach in NCAA Division 1 lacrosse history and has won nearly 80 percent of his games at Duke.
All this success had to start somewhere. For Danowski, it was at LIU Post back in 1982.
The Bronxville, NY native began his coaching career as an assistant coach at LIU Post, four years after he earned his master’s degree from there.
He spent a total of four years with the Pioneers, three as head coach, before accepting another head coaching position; this one at Hofstra University, where he spent 21 years.
“Hofstra had a little bit more resources and a Division 1 athletic program. It was a step up for sure,” Danowski said while comparing the two Long Island programs. “We weren’t Princeton or Johns Hopkins, but we were good, and we were going to compete.”
And compete they did. Only two years after taking the reins, Danowski had turned a 3-11 team into a top-15 program in the nation.
“We really didn’t know what we were doing. We were all part-timers,” Danowski said of that Hofstra coaching staff. “A lot of guys from that 3-11 team decided not to come back to school, transfer to other schools or decided to stay at Hofstra and not play lacrosse. So, it was a clean slate, for the most part, and we were able to… get to work.”
Danowski was quick to unselfishly credit the players for the quick turnaround.
“We had a really good recruiting class,” he said of his roster that turned the program around. “We had good older leadership. We had some leadership [and] we had good young players.”
“We had a really great mix of guys who were hungry… and wanted to be really good college players.
At Hofstra, Danowski put together a 192-123 record, including 17 wins in his final year, which is tied for the most wins in a season in NCAA Division 1 lacrosse history. He led the team to eight conference championships and eight NCAA Tournament appearances.
With all the success that Danowski brought to Long Island lacrosse, one thing stood out to him as memorable about his time in New York.
“The people. There’s no doubt about that,” he said. “At Post, the guys who went there – they were terrific young men. They turned out to be great professionals. And the same thing at Hofstra. It would be the people I worked with.”
After his 21 successful years at Hofstra, Danowski accepted the men’s lacrosse head coaching position at Duke, where his son, Matt, was a senior at the time. The Blue Devils were coming off a national championship appearance – but also the sexual assault scandal of 2006 which left the program dangling by a thread.
“It was a chance to do some good in the world,” he said. “You don’t get those opportunities too many times in your life. I didn’t know everything that went on that Spring of 2006, but I knew that… these were really good, solid young men from great families.”
“These guys had gone through something so extraordinarily unique and so painful that I couldn’t relate to any of that. The balance of trying to… make [lacrosse] important in their eyes but not too important – it was difficult.”
Danowski says stepping into such a delicate program did not bring much pressure.
“Didn’t feel any pressure at all,” he said plainly. “These were extremely bright kids, extremely motivated. They did everything that year so perfectly. They couldn’t have responded better than they did.”
Now, 13 years later, the Blue Devils are off to a strong start, currently holding a 3-1 record and coming off a 10-9 win over No. 5 University of Denver, which bumped them up to the No. 5 spot in the national polls.
Even while coaching a top-five program in the nation, Danowski realizes that some aspects of coaching are the same as they were during his time at Hofstra.
“It’s still about the fundamentals,” he said. “It’s still about the relationships of the players. It’s still about teaching, discipline. You don’t need a lot. You need a bunch of guys who are driven, who love playing the game and who are willing to be coached.”
“If you can find the right people, they learn to love each other, and they’ll play for each other.”
Danowski says he has been surrounded by coaching practically all his life.
“I had some tremendous influences growing up,” he said. “My father was a coach, my brother… was a coach. So, it was all around me. I was just enamored with the relationships and the experiences that were available to someone.”
Even with all the tremendous success that he has brought to multiple lacrosse programs, Danowski had trouble thinking of his single greatest accomplishment. He came up with something unique.
“The fact that I’m still coaching, I guess,” he said with a laugh. “It’s like somebody who goes to work every day and you just do your job to the best of your ability. That’s kind of it. I love coming to work every day. That’s probably my greatest accomplishment.”
