Posted on 04/12/2015 4:22:21 PM PDT by abb
This week on 60 Minutes, Armen Keteyian interviewed Coach Mike Pressler, the lacrosse coach who was forced to resign after three of his players were accused of brutally attacking and raping an exotic dancer at a team party in 2006.
It's a story 60 Minutes co-producers Michael Radutzky and Tanya Simon remember well. They followed the case from the time the accusations were made in March of 2006 -- to a year later in 2007 when the players were declared innocent.
In that time, 60 Minutes produced three detailed reports on the strange details surrounding the case, and conducted interviews with the three players and their families, the forensic expert involved in the case, even the other exotic dancer that was there the night of party, Kim Roberts.
snip
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
ping
just watched the lead in after the Masters....they actually said “in the rush to judgement” talking about the coach..
turned it off- won’t watch 60 minutes..
The Duke coach’s career was ruined over bogus charges. Just like this poor sap Cop down in South Carolina is having his career and life ruined. But the truth will come out. It already is. All Freepers go to the new today thread entitld “Game Changer OR Paradigm Shift”. It basically exonerates the Cop who was tethered to the perp by a taser wire! It puts the lie one again to the MSM and the race mongers.
Of course, just like in Ferguson, MO, the Cop’s job will be gone and his life turned upside down. It’s sickening. Keep scrolling down in the Game Changer thread. Pics, charts, video’s and narrative all pointing to what really happened. Hope this shuts up all the Freepers who once again jumped the gun (pardon the pun), or should I say the taser.
Thank you for the outstanding work on this case, Ed Bradley. RIP.
http://www.bryantbulldogs.com/sports/mlax/2014-15/releases/20150412g9vrkq
Lacrosse Magazine: Pressler Finds His Truth in Loyalty to Bryant
Apr 12, 2015
SMITHFIELD, R.I. — For the men’s lacrosse team at Bryant University, it’s a glorious afternoon in mid-February.
The Bulldogs are flying around their freshly plowed practice field, surrounded by six-foot snow banks that tell of an unusually harsh winter. Snow flurries fall from the chronically gray New England sky. But the wind is calm, the temperature hovers comfortably in the upper 20s and the team is thrilled to be outside, for a change, conducting a two-hour full-speed workout.
And there is no question who is in charge. That would be the 55-year-old, hooded head coach with the sandy beard, Bulldogs cap and ever-present brown shades. That would be the director, shuffling urgently from one spot to the next, dishing out suggestions, encouragement and criticism in animated bursts.
That would be Mike Pressler, who in his ninth season at Bryant clearly is in his element.
“Midfield tryouts today, baby!” Pressler barks.
The Bulldogs are an up-and-coming Division I program a year removed from a historic season that produced a school-record 16 wins and Bryant’s first-ever trip to the NCAA tournament quarterfinals.
On this day, however, Bryant is a frustrated, 0-2 team with turnover issues, scoring problems and no defined second line among its many inexperienced midfielders.
Pressler peppers offensive players with motivational outbursts.
“You’ve got to fly to get to the middle!”
“Look what happens with a little creativity!”
“Don’t always go to your strength. It’s not going to help you!”
“No matter who you are, whether you’ve scored 50 points or made 10 stops in a row, he is going to call you out for making mistakes,” says sophomore attackman Tucker James, the 2014 Northeast Conference Rookie of the Year who helped Bryant make history by going 16-5 and knocking off No. 2 seed Syracuse in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
Near the end of practice, however, James draws Pressler’s partially unprintable ire for throwing a sloppy throwback pass resulting in a turnover.
“Coach demands a high standard from everyone. If you don’t live up to it, you’ll hear about it,” James says. “He’s fair and consistent with that. I got what I deserved.”
“[Pressler] drives you to come in every day prepared. He motivates you to match his intensity,” junior goalie Gunnar Waldt says. “With the passion he has for this game and for coaching, he’s incredible. It’s amazing how life twists and turns, and I get to be with that guy.”
What a ride it has been for Pressler, whose journey of heartbreak and rebirth finds him entrenched at Bryant, the only place that would have him in 2006. That spring, a notorious incident and what turned out to be a big lie derailed Pressler’s successful career.
SNAPSHOTS OF A SCANDAL
Has it really been nine years since Pressler, then the reigning Division I Coach of the Year with the most talented team in his 16th season in Durham, was kicked out of Duke as the school’s infamous lacrosse rape scandal erupted into a national story?
Has it really been nine years since Pressler, unable to land a coaching job anywhere else — not even as a high school volunteer, not even at Washington and Lee, his alma mater — found his new home at a small, then-Division II school outside of Providence?
“A lot of Blue Devils became Bulldogs fans back then. It seems like so long ago,” says Joe Donovan, a 1997 Duke graduate who played midfield for three seasons under Pressler. Donovan works for an equity sales trader in Boston, where he is married with four children.
“I felt anger back in ‘06, lots of it. [Duke] almost destroyed Coach Pressler’s life,” Donovan adds. “Coach always had our backs. He still does. He always put the team first and did things right. You wanted to go through a wall for him. He’s an honest, selfless guy who taught us how to be good fathers and sons.”
Pressler also transformed Duke from an ACC afterthought by winning 153 games. He guided the Blue Devils to 10 NCAA tournaments, to the school’s first final four in 1997 and eventually to the NCAA title game in 2005, all while graduating 100 percent of his players.
He says he doesn’t spend much time anymore looking back on the darkest chapter of his life.
It started March 13, 2006, when members of the Duke lacrosse team hosted an off-campus house party and hired two exotic dancers, one of whom — Crystal Mangum — falsely accused players David Evans, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty of sexual assault. The nightmare that ensued always will rate a prominent mention in Pressler’s biography.
Pressler recounted the whole episode in a book, “It’s Not About The Truth: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Case and the Lives It Shattered.” He demanded compensation from Duke for wrongful termination. The parties agreed upon a settlement for an undisclosed amount in June 2007, then reached another settlement agreement in 2010 after Pressler filed suit against the school for breaking the confidentiality terms of the original agreement.
The snapshots endure: The Duke administration, led by President Richard H. Brodhead and ex-athletic director Joseph Alleva, canceling the 2006 season after eight games and forcing Pressler’s resignation; TV trucks camped outside his vandalized house next to Koskinen Stadium, making life miserable for his wife, Susan, and two young daughters, Janet and Maggie; the threatening emails; the taunts directed at his daughters; the rape case crumbling in 2007, amid the ethics violations of Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, who later was disbarred.
Pressler says he is far more consumed these days with squeezing achievement out of the Bulldogs and staying loyal to the place many expected him to leave by now for more prestigious digs. According to Pressler, he said no thanks to overtures from North Carolina, Denver and Maryland when those jobs opened.
Nine years after Pressler made a promise with his word and a handshake to Bryant University President Ronald Machtley and its athletic director, Bill Smith, that he would honor his original five-year contract — whether or not the school followed through on its move to Division I — Pressler has no intentions of leaving.
“I have my faults, but a lack of loyalty is not one of them. In our darkest hour, nobody would throw us a lifeline, but this little Division II school in Rhode Island did,” says Pressler, who is signed through 2019, and whose youngest daughter, Maggie, has committed to play lacrosse at Bryant beginning in the fall of 2016. “I had no choice but to take this job. I guess you should never say ‘Never,’ but to leave this place for something else, after all they’ve done for me and my girls, I just don’t see it. This is home.”
THE PATH TO DURHAM
Pressler chose the right place and the right profession.
Entering the 2015 season, after 30 years as a head coach, he had won 228 games at the Division I level, 322 games overall, and was averaging 11.5 wins per season at Bryant, which started transitioning to Division I in 2008 and joined the NEC in 2010. He also coached Team USA to a gold medal in 2010.
Pressler’s calling to coach can be traced to his youth in Wilton, an affluent town in the southeastern corner of Connecticut, not far from Manhattan. His father, Richard, a retired apparel businessman who won a light heavyweight boxing title in the U.S. Marine Corps in the mid-1950s, taught Mike and his two brothers to box, fish and hunt and pushed them to embrace competition.
Pressler played hockey and basketball, and he loved being in the middle of the action as a baseball catcher. He became a star football player at Wilton High, where he was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 1998.
The game changer for Pressler was Guy Whitten, the New England lacrosse coaching legend. He first put a stick in Pressler’s hands at Wilton High and turned the lefty attackman into one of the school’s finer products.
“Coach Whitten just inspired you. You wanted to be him,” says Pressler, who makes an annual trek each fall to join Whitten, now retired, on a bird-hunting trip in northern Maine.
By the time Pressler was being recruited by colleges, he was determined to play two sports, with lacrosse playing second fiddle to football.
Dom Starsia, then a young assistant at Brown and now in his 23rd season as head coach at Virginia, could not offer Pressler such a deal. He failed to lure Pressler to Providence, although the two future ACC rivals started a friendship that continues today.
Jack Emmer, who would retire in 2005 with the more career wins (326) than any collegiate lacrosse coach, was in the midst of guiding Washington and Lee to 10 straight NCAA tournaments when he recruited Pressler in the mid-1970s. He visited the Pressler household with the two-sport carrot that convinced Mike to come to Lexington, Va.
That night, Emmer, who now is retired and living in Jacksonville, Fla., and remains Pressler’s mentor, was treated to an unusual spectacle. Mike and his younger and bigger brother, Mark, laced up their boxing gloves and put on an exhibition that lasted several hard-fought minutes.
“It was quite a battle. Mike came out second-best, although he probably sees it differently,” Emmer recalls. “Those boys were a competitive bunch. That’s how Mike was from the day he arrived [at W&L]. He really separated himself from his peers with his ability to lead young men his own age. He was definitely a future coach.”
Pressler became a four-year starter in lacrosse and football and was a team captain in both as a senior. For W&L’s Division III football team, he played nose tackle at 5-foot-11, 215 pounds, and was a first-team All-American as a senior. Under Emmer, he started for three years at attack, then switched to close defense to help that graduation-depleted unit as a senior in 1982.
During his first four years as a coach, Pressler bounced among three different jobs, spending his first year as a football and lacrosse assistant at Hampden-Sydney, before taking Emmer’s advice and grabbing the head coaching job at VMI in 1983, its first year as a program.
“I got $1,500 plus room and board,” Pressler says. “I thought I’d hit the lotto.”
After Pressler guided VMI to a 7-4 finish, he accepted a promotion to full-time status as a football assistant and head lacrosse coach. But a few months later, Emmer left W&L to take over at Army. Pressler joined Emmer as his top assistant.
That lasted for two years, and it would be the last time Pressler would work as an assistant. He moved on to Ohio Wesleyan, where he led the Battling Bishops to a 69-16 record and three Division III title game appearances over five years.
He also met Sue, a former All-American swimmer at Michigan who had participated in the 1980 Olympic Trials and was in the middle of a strong eight-year run as men’s and women’s swimming coach at OWU. They married in 1989.
A NATIONAL POWER EMERGES
Pressler’s lacrosse winning percentage (.812) remains the best in Ohio Wesleyan history, and it piqued the interest of former Duke athletic director Tom Butters in 1990.
At that point, Duke was a 50-year-old program with a few glory years. But the Blue Devils, with just 10 winning seasons over five decades, had faded far enough into irrelevance that the school was considering dropping it as a varsity sport. When Pressler interviewed for the job, Butters asked him to make the case for keeping lacrosse around.
The pitch worked, and Pressler assumed control of a program with five scholarships, no facilities and a $10,000 budget for assistants.
“I didn’t see it as much of a risk,” Sue Pressler says. “Mike and I have the same work ethic, the same drive. He has endless energy, and he knows what he’s doing.”
“Duke had sort of a hidden history in lacrosse,” Starsia says. “But they weren’t on the tip of your tongue like Hopkins, Carolina, Maryland and Virginia. Serious lacrosse players weren’t looking at Duke. That changed after Michael got there.”
Duke made its first NCAA tournament in Pressler’s second season in 1992. Two years later, the Blue Devils beat Maryland for their first NCAA tournament win — Duke’s first victory over the Terps since 1954, when the Blue Devils won the ACC title in the conference’s inaugural year.
As Pressler was convincing the school’s administration to pump more funding into the program, Duke’s progress continued. In 1997, Duke advanced to its first final four. Eight years later, with sophomore Matt Danowski and freshman Zack Greer leading the best offense in the game, the Blue Devils went 17-3 and lost by a goal to Hopkins in the 2005 NCAA championship game.
Expectations were sky high.
“We had just put a new addition on our house in Duke Forest. Our lacrosse camp was becoming huge. We had almost the entire starting lineup back in ‘06. My family was entrenched in the community,” Pressler says. “We were on top of the world. Within a three-week period, it all came crashing down.”
A TORTUROUS SPRING
Pressler rejected the university’s advice to distance himself from his embroiled players, since he was certain no sexual assault ever occurred. The team and the coach paid the price for the firestorm that consumed the campus. There was even talk about shutting down the program.
“The thought of [Pressler] not being the Duke coach was unfathomable to me,” says Kevin Cassese, a 2003 Duke graduate and All-American midfielder who was Pressler’s assistant at the time. Cassese reluctantly accepted the interim coaching title as Pressler’s replacement, before current coach John Danowski took over in August 2006.
“I was honored to play for Duke, but it was more important to me to play for Coach Pressler,” adds Cassese, now in his eighth season as head coach at Lehigh. “He’s the inspiration that drew me to Duke. He’s still like a second father.”
After Pressler’s ouster on April 5, 2006, a torturous spring followed for his family. It was a confusing and stressful time for Janet and Maggie, who were 14 and 8 at the time, respectively. Pressler would take long walks alone deep into Duke Forest, sometimes screaming in the woods to blow off steam. The stark reality was that no one was interested in his coaching services.
“It was toxic living there. I had to get my family out of Durham,” Pressler said. “If I never coached again, [Duke] won. That was not going to happen.”
The lowest point came when he reached out to Washington and Lee, which needed a head lacrosse coach following the 2006 season. The school had not yet opened its search, but the athletic director met with Pressler to let him know he would not be considered for the opening. The meeting took place at a rest stop in Lynchburg, Va.
“The message was, ‘Don’t come on campus, because it would be embarrassing for you and us,’” Sue Pressler says. “That was very painful.”
Bryant entered the picture in the late spring of 2006. The connection started with a phone conversation between Bill Smith, Bryant’s brand new athletic director, and Army head coach Joe Alberici, Smith’s childhood friend and Pressler’s former assistant at Duke.
Smith needed a lacrosse coach. Alberici recommended Pressler. Smith and Machtley, the university’s president, were intrigued.
Smith followed the rape case closely, heard more suggestions to hire Pressler and read the report headed by Duke law professor James E. Coleman Jr. examining the case and Pressler’s role in it. Smith concluded that Duke committed a huge error in firing Pressler.
“I look at what happened to Mike as a travesty, the way Duke shoved him and those student-athletes under the bus,” Smith says. “There was a false narrative dominating the headlines. I was impressed by how Mike had the backs of those players at a time when that wasn’t popular. He was adamant that they didn’t [rape anyone]. When you sit and talk with him, you realize he’s the real deal. I want passion and intelligence in a coach. I thought hiring Mike was a no-brainer.”
“Mike made a very compelling case that he was guilty of nothing except being a good coach. He was treated poorly by the Duke administration. He was distraught,” says Machtley, who regularly texts or talks to Pressler before and after games and drops by sometimes to watch practice. “We went through a very thoughtful process [hiring Pressler]. I felt sympathetic to a great coach who had no place to go.”
REBIRTH AT BRYANT
Besides Bryant being Pressler’s only option, it had advantages. He grew up not far from Smithfield, and the Presslers had spent many a vacation at Block Island, on the Rhode Island coast. Pressler still looks forward to fly-fishing for striped bass when the family makes that trip.
By August of 2006, the deal was done after Pressler had looked Machtley in the eye and promised to fulfill that five-year commitment, during which Bryant would not be eligible to compete in the NCAA tournament.
And soon after Pressler signed his contract, the loyalty started flowing to Bryant in the form of cash. To this day, donations to Pressler’s program keep coming from ex-Duke players. Pressler says eight different ex-lacrosse captains from Duke wrote checks to Bryant in the past year.
The most public show of support came from Zack Greer. Over the 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2008 seasons, Greer had become one of the top scorers in NCAA history. But, given the chance to take one more shot at Duke’s first national title — since the NCAA in 2007 granted the entire 2006 team another year of eligibility — Greer came north instead to earn an MBA at Bryant and to reunite with Pressler for one more season.
Greer posted 42 goals and 26 assists in 2009, the Bulldogs’ final season at the Division II level. The NCAA does not officially recognize those statistics. They mean everything to the Bulldogs. A large poster of Greer graces Bryant’s locker room.
“I certainly contemplated going back to Duke for one more year. It was hard to leave that family,” says Greer, who plays professionally and is an analyst at an investment firm in Hermosa Beach, Calif. “I just felt it was time to move on and get out of the limelight. I also wanted to give something back [to Pressler] and help his program get on the map.”
“Zack’s picture is up there because of one of the greatest gestures of unconditional loyalty you could imagine,” Pressler says. “Without a doubt, he brought legitimacy to Bryant.”
Over the next few years, the Bulldogs started winning consistently, while the quality of Pressler’s recruits rose. So have the fundraising levels and the school’s commitment to strengthening lacrosse. Six years ago, the new locker room was finished as part of $2.7 million in improvements to the football stadium.
But the crown jewels — a training room triple the size of Bryant’s current weight room and a full-field, indoor facility including new coaches’ offices — are on the way. The project, which should be finished by early next year, is part of a $50 million commitment to buildings and facilities upgrades at this school of about 3,600 undergraduates.
Pressler has come a long way since that first year of adjustment in Smithfield. While the family remained back in Durham, he lived alone for six months in an apartment. That first season in 2007 was awkward, as media coverage swelled around the Bulldogs.
“Lots of people were coming to see Division II games, not for anything Bryant was doing, but because of where the head coach used to be,” Pressler says. “That was tough to deal with.”
As the Duke case wheezed to its ending later in 2007, Pressler’s life gained normalcy, as did the lives of his wife and daughters. Sue, who had worked for eight years in the admissions office at Duke, now is an academic advisor for student-athletes at Bryant. Janet went on to graduate from Loyola University in Maryland in 2013 with a psychology degree, after playing volleyball for four years and serving as a captain for the Greyhounds. She is in charge of marketing and promotions for all 22 varsity sports at Bryant, where she also is pursuing an MBA.
THIS IS HOME
Mike Pressler is exactly where he needs to be, in the same line of work that’s been meant for him for over three decades, at the place that offered him a restart button during his lowest period.
Nearly each morning during the season by 5 a.m., Pressler is up watching tape and sending an email with a message of the day to his team.
“I get more emails from Coach P than any of my professors,” says junior attackman Shane Morrell, who found his way to Smithfield after a high school knee injury nearly ended his Division I dream.
Last May, Morrell lived out that dream. With faceoff man Kevin Massa and Waldt, two lightly regarded Division I recruits, playing huge roles, Bryant made its second straight playoff trip to the Carrier Dome count by edging Syracuse 10-9. Before the opening faceoff, Pressler told the Bulldogs not to celebrate on the field after the victory he told them was about to happen.
“There’s never a doubt in his mind. [Pressler] tells you how it is and he shows you how to make it work,” says Morrell, shaking his head at the Syracuse memory and his experience of playing for Pressler. “What are the odds that Coach P even ends up here, at a gritty, small school in the middle of Rhode Island with two feet of snow on the ground? It turns out it was the perfect spot for him.”
The Presslers would not argue. Back in early March, they traveled to Chapel Hill — just down the road from Durham — where the men’s lacrosse team played a spring-break game and lost a 10-9 heartbreaker to North Carolina. Before that, the family had only traveled to Durham to attend a funeral.
During the five-day trip, the Presslers attended a large party with old friends and colleagues. There was lots of reminiscing about good times and kids now grown. The scandal and Mike’s firing never came up.
“Nothing had changed, and everything had changed. It was a wonderful trip, but when it was time to leave, we couldn’t wait to get home,” Sue Pressler says. “Bryant embraced us and gave us an opportunity for a life. We feel forever indebted to them.”
“This has never been a job for me,” Mike Pressler says. “The joy of being able to compete and to drive these guys to be the best they can be is something I thrive on. I need the rewards and disappointments of Saturdays and the challenge of solving the issues of the season. I need to coach, and I couldn’t imagine doing it in a better place.”
have to acknowledge the person who once said, "the liberal media always eats its dead."
I normally share your disdain for 60 Minutes. However, to be fair to them, they were just about the ONLY Drive-By Media news organization that at the time reported accurately on the The Duke Lacrosse Frame.
I was just at a Chester/Mendham lax game today. Same program that feeds a ton of kids to Duke. Tenacity, sportsmanship, and well mannered young men were on full display.
Uhhh.... you’re really going to equate the two? How are the charges bogus against the cop? You comfortable with the cops shooting unarmed people in the back? You know some “truth” the rest of us don’t?
It’s not unreasonable to believe the cop thought his perp had gotten hold of his taser.
He wasn’t unarmed, he had two big fists. And he indeed had possession of the taser and shot the cop with it, it appears, as the wire was hanging out of the Cops chest, and then his leg. He was tethered to the perp by the wire. Did you read the “Game Change” thread and look at the pics, charts, video’s, and read the narrative? How can you still be going after the Cop unless you just plain hate Cops. Do you?
Stand up guy.
Indeed.
Thanks for the ping abb.
Here is a transcript and the broadcast.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-duke-lacrosse-coach-on-rape-scandal-60-minutes/
I know the Lacrosse Kids received a substantial settlement from Duke.
Why not the coach ?
Why didn’t he sue ?
He did.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/596200.html
Duke, ex-coach settle up
Pressler was fired amid lacrosse scandal
Anne Blythe, Staff Writer
Mike Pressler, the former Duke University lacrosse coach who was fired amid allegations that three members of his team gang-raped an escort service dancer, ***has settled a lawsuit with his former employer.***
John Burness, a spokesman for Duke, said the settlement was reached in late March or April. He refused to release details of the agreement, which he called “an amicable, fair financial settlement.”
Pressler, who built a national powerhouse lacrosse team during his 16 seasons at Duke, has written a book about his experience.
He was fired in April 2006. His dismissal came several weeks after Crystal Gail Mangum alleged that she was sexually assaulted at a lacrosse team party held over spring break in March 2006.
The fact that Broadhead is still the president of Duke proves that higher education is the Peter Principle on steroids.
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