The second best defensive basketball team in the nation doesn’t reside in Storrs or compete in any national “power” conferences, instead they play their home games right here at Alumni Hall.
The Fairfield University women’s basketball team, who are currently only less than one point behind West Virginia, has a shot to end the year as the national defensive champions. Despite the absence of hype and national media attention that surrounds bigger name schools for the team, the squad has managed to secure a high national ranking.
Achieving this success doesn’t happen overnight.
Fourth year head coach Joe Frager is aware that the main focus on the team had to be defense, saying, “We knew going into this season that we weren’t going to be the type of team that was capable of scoring 75, 80, 85 points on a regular basis, so we knew we were needed to try to keep teams down,” he said.
Time and dedication are essential; it takes months of sweat on the practice court and hours in the film room to make this unit a defensive rock started before they even play their first game.
“Most of the preseason what we do is we work on fundamentals, we work on guarding different screening actions, how we’re going to guard ball screens, how we’re going to guard staggered screens,” Frager said. “Once the season starts it’s just basically scouting report defense [and] breaking down a whole bunch of film.”
That method of breaking down film is more than watching tapes. Assistant Coach Laura Scinto heads the staff in charge of editing down the tapes. She says they spend about 6-8 hours watching each game, up to as many as four or five together, and then cutting all those hours of footage into fifteen minute segments.
When the squad suits up for practice they will focus 20-45 minutes on defense, depending on what offensive set their opponent will run. All that time helps implant what Scinto says is that the most important part of Fairfield’s defensive system: “attention to detail.”
But as good as the Stags have been in recent years, this season they have a chance to make national attention, at least on the defensive side. They have held six opponents to under 50 points and have done so without the talent of big-time players.
Frager said that their defense is based on more character, “to try and get a team to play that way you’re constantly preaching: communication, trust and pride.”
Since being named the second head coach in school history, Frager has led the team to an average of twenty wins a year including the program’s first ever postseason victory last season.
He believes that the most important aspect of a defensive team is their consistency. He said, “that’s always something I’ve always believed in all the years that I’ve coached. You can have off-nights shooting the ball, but there’s no excuse to really have an off- night defensively.”
Frager’s defense system has been the focal point of his Hall of Fame career. Before coming to Fairfield he led the Southern Connecticut State Owls to a Division II National Championship, which earned him National Coach of the Year honors. He also has already won the statistical defensive national championship with the Owls.
He explained, “I guess it was the way I was raised. Going back to when I was very, very young it’s something my dad tried to instill in me and every coach that I ever played for, and the coaches that I even to this day look towards,” he said.
That pattern led Frager to being inducted into the New England Basketball Hall of Fame last year. While some good teams might be based on a top defensive system, if they want to grab national attention or gain fan support, offense still remains more popular.
Frager said, “It’s hard to recruit blue chip players by saying we’re going to defend, we’re going to defend, we’re going to defend. The elite players, the top 100 players, want to know what they’re going to do offensively.” However, Frager believes that the more successful squads are deeper than just being able to score.
“If you look at the teams that constantly have always advanced and done well, they are not only gifted offensively but they’re capable of getting some stops as well,” he said.
While the old cliché states that ‘offense puts people in the seats’, Frager, Scinto and the Stags only care about another overused motto, ‘defense wins championships.’
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