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Lacrosse rebounds after Duke rape accusation case

Jim Jennings, the commissioner of the National Lacrosse League, remembers sitting in a meeting with a potential advertiser about a year ago.

Jennings, in his seventh year as the head of the professional indoor league, spent most of the 90-minute meeting discussing the Duke lacrosse case. He left without a deal.

"People didn't want to associate their brand with lacrosse," Jennings said.

The Duke case centered on a woman's accusation that three Blue Devils players had raped her at a team party in March last year, after she had been hired to perform as a stripper.

One year later, the charges against the players were dropped and the North Carolina attorney general called the district attorney, Michael Nifong, a "rogue prosecutor" in a "tragic rush to accuse."

As the case swung over the course of a year, so did the perception of its impact on the sport, which many thought would be harmed.

"It's not the way we wanted to grow the game, certainly," said Duke coach John Danowski, whose team was scheduled to play Johns Hopkins for the NCAA title on yesterday at M&T Bank Stadium. "But listen, we weren't the first to say that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Someone said that long ago."

"While we never want to experience this again or see something like this happen, in a bizarre way this is going to help grow the game," he said.

Bob Carpenter, the publisher of Inside Lacrosse magazine, said: "No one is glad this happened. This didn't actually grow the game. It shed a spotlight on a phenomenon that was about to peak on its own."

The numbers chronicling the sport's growth have been telling for years. The Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association's State of the Industry Report for this year showed that lacrosse was the top sport in terms of sales growth, with a 31 percent increase.
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