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Lacrosse prowess pays off for player

Expansion team stuns UO ‘club guy’ with invitation

By STEVE BRANDON
Issue date: Fri, Sep 2, 2005
The Tribune

Danny Ernst was all set to take his anthropology degree and other possessions to an internship in Austin, Texas.
“Then the phone rang, time froze, my jaw dropped, and everything got flipped upside down,” he says.
The caller informed Ernst, 22, that he had just been drafted by the Portland LumberJax, an expansion team in the indoor National Lacrosse League.
“I had no idea any scouts were even looking at me,” says Ernst, a 2001 Grant High graduate who played four years of club lacrosse at the University of Oregon. “I can’t believe it. It’s like, ‘Who’s this club guy coming out of nowhere?’ I haven’t stopped smiling … or shaking.”
The LumberJax took Ernst with their fifth and final pick, 64th overall, in Monday’s NLL entry draft.