Fairfield Women’s Basketball continued their remarkable season with wins over conference foes Quinnipiac and Canisius last week, improving their record to 17-1 on the year.
The week began for the Stags with an intrastate trip to the Bobcats on Thursday. Freshman standout Meghan Andersen led all scorers with 19 points, followed by teammate Kendall McGruder ‘25 with a season-high 18, as Fairfield pulled out a 74-59 victory.
After a back-and-forth first half, the Stags used a dominant third quarter in which they shot 75% from the field to widen their lead, a stark departure from their prior contest against Marist where the team shot just 38.2% for the game.
“I thought at Marist we didn’t do a good job of sharing the basketball,” head coach Carly Thibault-DuDonis said in a postgame press release. “We took that to heart to create good shots for one another.”
That change was evident on the court and in the box score, where the Stags posted 16 total assists compared to just seven against Marist.
The Stags then came home to Leo D. Mahoney Arena on Saturday to take on Canisius. Where the game against Quinnipiac was hotly contested in the first half, the contest against the Golden Griffins was not. Fairfield used a stifling defensive effort to hold Canisius to just six points in the first quarter, forcing six turnovers in the frame.
From there, the Stags never looked back. The final tally featured 12 steals as part of 25 Golden Griffins turnovers, putting an exclamation point on a convincing 70-42 win.
Janelle Brown ‘24 scored 19 points to lead the team, followed by Andersen’s second double-digit effort of the week with 16.
The two victories extended the Stags’ winning streak to 15 games, the second longest in the country behind national number one South Carolina. The mark also ties the university record since the Stags became a Division I program.
As such, the team and individual accolades have been plenty. Andersen is an eight-time Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Rookie of the Week this season and has been MAAC Player of the Week twice. Brown won three straight Player of the Week awards earlier in the season and ranks 12th nationally in field goal percentage.
Their tremendous seasons, combined with the number one scoring offense and number two scoring defense in the conference, have been the engine of a team that is receiving votes in the AP Top 25 poll for the first time in program history.
“I’m proud of the collective effort of every single person in this program,” Thibault-DuDonis said in a press release after the Canisius win. “We have a long way to go still but I’m proud of the day-to-day intentional progress that we made.”
The Stags will try to add to their winning streak as they head to Rider on Thursday, Feb. 1. Tip-off is at 7 p.m.
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