Women's Defense is Number 2

The second best defensive team in the entire nation doesn’t reside in Storrs or compete in any of the typical “power” conferences, instead they play their home games right here at Alumni Hall. Even though the Fairfield University women’s basketball team might not get the national attention on the news, or enjoy the hype that bigger schools do, they have a chance to end the year as the national champions in scoring defense, currently only less than a point behind West Virginia for the top spot.

Fourth year head coach Joe Frager was aware that the main focus on the team had to be defense, “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.

Achieving this success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes months of sweat on the practice court and hours in the film room. The process to make this unit a defensive rock started before they played in a 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 that she says that spends about 6-8 hours watching each game, which could be as many as 4-5 contests, and then cutting each team into 15 minute segments for the players. When the squad suits up for practice they will focus 20-45 on defense depending on what scheme the offense runs. All that time helps implant what Scinto says is that the most important part of Fairfield’s defensive system is “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 says 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 he has led the team to an average of twenty wins a year including the program’s first ever postseason victory just a season ago. Frager believes that the most important aspect of a defensive team is their constancy, “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, “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. “I’ve always admired the way Coach Knight used to coach at Indiana defensively, I have a lot of admiration for the way Coach Izzo coaches at Michigan State, so those are the types of coaches that we’ve tried to pattern ourselves after.” 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. “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 their 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 their capable of getting some stops as well.” 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.’