March Madness has arrived, and Fairfield women’s basketball is looking to make history for the third time in as many years.
The Stags will take the court Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, against No. 6 Notre Dame with a chance to claim the program’s first-ever NCAA Tournament win. But the road to get to this point has been more challenging than any year prior.
Fairfield made a statement in its season opener back in November, going on the road and knocking off Big East foe Villanova behind junior road runner Meghan Andersen’s 35 points, then a career high. A subsequently successful season from the Wildcats, who enter the tournament themselves as a No. 10 seed this weekend, provided a big resume boost for the Stags and set the tone for the year to come.
“The very first win at Villanova was a big start to the season,” said head coach Carly Thibault-DuDonis, “and that ended up being a quad one win against a really good team.”
Similar opportunities against high-level competition were a trademark of the Stags’ nonconference schedule this season. The team took down reigning American Athletic Conference champion South Florida and lost in a four-quarter contest against nationally ranked North Carolina during its trip to Las Vegas for the WBCA Challenge.
The Stags also blew out reigning Patriot League champion Lehigh at home, and made a then-program record 18 4-pointers in falling short on the road against Iowa, who has remained a fixture in or just outside of the national top 10 all year long.
The defining moment of the early season, however, came during a two game road-trip the first weekend in December. The Stags fell to Howard in Washington, D.C., 72-69, squandering a double-digit first-half lead and surrendering a 46% shooting mark from long range to the Bison. After the loss to Iowa the week prior, it was the first two-game losing streak for the Stags since November 2024.
But the team had just one day afterward to regroup before a date with Richmond, who started that losing streak the year prior with a 62-39 thrashing inside Mahoney Arena.
“That day we had between our loss to Howard and the Richmond game, we had some hard conversations as a team,” said graduate road runner Lauren Beach. “We really had to do a lot of self-reflection, of the places where we just weren’t where we needed to be yet.”
Those hard conversations seemed to work, as the Stags responded with a 20-point win over the Spiders, shooting over 60% from the field and setting another new single-game three-point record with 19 makes –a number they would beat yet again a month later, making 20 against Saint Peter’s.
That kicked off a 13-game winning streak the Stags carried through the beginning of MAAC play into late January, which included holding four different opponents under 50 points and the program’s first triple-double from junior guard Kaety L’Amoreaux.
But the adversity would return, as the Stags fell on their home floor to in-state rival Quinnipiac in a nationally televised matchup of conference unbeatens.
“Certainly, after our Quinnipiac loss, we had to reevaluate a bit. What I liked, though, was that I wouldn’t necessarily call it a low,” Thibault-DuDonis said. “I think what this team did well this year is because we have senior leadership and experience, any setbacks that we had, we had some really important, necessary dialogue, and it wasn’t that the sky is falling, it was very much focused on how can we get better?”
The Stags haven’t dropped a game since.
The ensuing tear has included, of course, a third straight conference title, a second stint in the AP Top 25 in the last three years and several more records and milestones, like breaking the team and individual single-game scoring records when Andersen dropped 40 points to spur a 109-48 win over Marist.
Through it all, the Stags have leaned on a camaraderie and bond they feel is closer than ever before.
“When relationships are the foundation for everything, and when we really care about each other and we all trust each other, it creates a space for us to be able to really self-reflect and say ‘this is what I need to be better at,’” Beach said. “Those conversations aren’t always super easy, but they need to be had so that we can do what we want to.”
Now, Notre Dame is all that stands in the way of the Stags taking that desired step into uncharted territory. And with a long and sometimes winding road mostly behind them, the wheel is in their hands to see how much farther it leads.
