Lacrosse will return to Duke University next season.
School president Richard Brodhead shut down this year's team on March 28 and accepted the resignation of coach Mike Pressler after three players were charged with rape.
"I am, I know, taking a risk in reinstating men's lacrosse," Brodhead said Monday in a prepared statement. "The reinstatement is inevitably probationary."
Duke University president Richard Brodhead is allowing the men's lacrosse team to return to the floor next season. (Sara D. Davis/Associated Press)
According to Brodhead, the school's athletics administrators would rethink their decision if they see any repeat of "patterns of irresponsible, individual or team behaviours familiar from the past."
Team captain David Evans, 23, of Bethesda, Md., and Reade Seligmann, 20, of Essex Fells, N.J., and Collin Finnerty, 19, of Garden City, N.Y., were charged with first-degree forcible rape, sexual offence and kidnapping, stemming from an alleged rape of a woman at a team party earlier this year.
Evans previously said his lawyers had given him a polygraph test and added Seligmann and Finnerty were innocent of all charges.
The indictments came amid allegations from a 27-year-old stripper that three white men raped her on March 13 at an off-campus party hosted by the team.
In April, ABC News reported that prosecutors claimed the alleged victim identified two of the players with 100 per cent certainty and was 90 per cent certain of the third.
Defence lawyers, who have insisted the players are innocent, have cited DNA tests in explaining that there was no conclusive match between any of the team's white players and the accuser.
Brodhead initiated a series of internal investigations, one of which concluded administrators were slow to react to the scandal in part because of initial doubts about the accuser's credibility.
With files from the Associated Press
