This Week in Sports – Feb. 12

Skiing: Each Saturday morning in January and February, the Fairfield ski team gathers in front of Alumni Hall before the sun rises.

Skis and snowboards clutched on top of their cars packed in Thule boxes, poles, helmets and boots in their trunks, they caravan North to Hunter Mountain, Wyndham Mountain, Mountain Creek or another ‘local hill’ for a weekend of racing.

For the first time in club history, both the men and women’s teams came home this past weekend from their final regular season race with first place trophies for their conference.

Other teams in the New Jersey Conference include Princeton, Scranton, Columbia, Rutgers, Lafayette and Lehigh. Coming home with hardware this weekend was junior Caity Barber who trounced the women’s league with a lead of over one hundred points. On the men’s side, both junior Greg Peterson, who won the men’s league by a small margin over teammate, and fellow junior Nick Carlucci, who came in second for the league but had more regular season wins than anyone in the league, finished at the top of individual events.

Prior to the team’s recent competition at Hunter Mountain, conference wins were not certain. A strong showing, though, by brothers Nick and senior Patrick Carlucci, and Peterson for the men, as well as Barber for the women, helped Fairfield clinch a win over rival Lehigh.

‘We’ve always been a consistent team in terms of our ranking in the New Jersey Conference,’ Carlucci said. ‘Each year since I was a freshman, we’ve done better and better but never won the conference, so coming out on top of the rest of the competition was a great way to end my college skiing career.’

Collectively, the men and women’s teams will lose three seniors next year: Amy Coyne, Carlucci and Kevin Dempsey.’

‘We’ll definitely miss the seniors,’ Barber said. ‘But we’re all focused on repeating our conference win next season.’
-Jon Ollwerther

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Up Next:

This coming weekend, the Fairfield men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams travel to Baltimore for the MAAC Swimming Championships at Loyola (Md.)