Carly Thibault-Dudonis calls a timeout in a tie game with 2 seconds left. She didn’t need to though.
“Coach Blake (Dudonis) does all of our special situations,” Thibault-Dudonis told Mid-Major Madness. “We go through them every shoot around, so they know it. We could have called it on the sideline.”
The play in question was an over-the-top inbound pass from Izabel Nicoletti-Leite to Emina Selimovic for a layup under the basket, and it worked. Fairfield escaped with a 61-59 win at Mount St. Mary’s despite leading for less than a minute the entire way. The Stags’ winning streak extended to 20, the second longest in the country, behind only top-ranked South Carolina.
Fairfield is not ranked in the AP Top 25. Prominent Bracketology sources such as ESPN and HerHoopStats predicts Fairfield needs the MAAC’s automatic bid to make the NCAA Tournament. But the Stags don’t need the approval, they know how good they are and they’ve known for a long time.
Thibault-Dudonis knew as soon as she entered the locker room following the team’s lone loss at Vanderbilt back in November.
“The fun thing about that is that we got to the locker room and our team wasn’t satisfied,” she said. “It wasn’t like a moral victory that we hung with an SEC team on the road, like they were mad that they didn’t win. They wanted to go get one at Rutgers because they knew that let one get away at Vandy, and that’s when I think I knew the type of team we had.”
Others in the program knew it long before that.
“I knew this team was special when we were here for summer workouts,” senior guard Nellie Brown said. “The way we were just knocking down shots, everybody was cheering for each other. The energy was great, the vibes were great, I already knew we were gonna be a championship team.”
Brown is in her fourth year with Fairfield. She’s paid her dues and she’s now the team’s emotional leader, on and off the floor.
“Nellie is a warrior,” Thibault-Dudonis said. “She is the epitome of a competitor and she has her fingerprints all over the game.”
As a rotation piece on Fairfield’s NCAA Tournament team under Joe Frager in 2021-22, Brown knows what it takes to reach the promised land. She credits the senior leadership of that team as a major influence on her excellence this season.
“[Former Fairfield guard] Rachel Hakes is one of the best leaders I’ve ever had,” Brown said. “Talking to her, and trying to get some feedback about…
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