Evolving Excellence

Laura Field has built a culture of sustained success by helping Fairfield Women’s Lacrosse reinvent itself season after season.

Nine straight MAA C Championship Games. Seven MAAC titles in eight seasons. Eight consecutive NCAA Tournament berths. For nearly a decade, the Fairfield University Women’s Lacrosse program has been a constant in the annual battle for a conference crown, emerging victorious far more often than not to represent the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference on the national postseason stage. But for Head Coach Laura Field—architect of the Stags’ unprecedented stretch of success—the program’s consistency has been about reinvention, not repetition.

“It’s a misconception that if you have success year after year, there is a formula to get there,” said Coach Field, a three-time MAAC Coach of the Year. “The biggest thing that we’ve recognized as a program is that the way to sustain success is to evolve and be adaptable.”

Only once in Coach Field’s 11-year tenure as head coach has Fairfield had the same leading scorer in back-to-back seasons, and the Stags have graduated at least one All-MAAC First Team performer at the conclusion of each of those 11 campaigns. At different points over the past decade, the Stags have ranked among the nation’s top 10 in scoring offense or scoring defense, while other Fairfield teams have reached the NCAA Tournament without leading the MAAC in either category.

All of this is testament to the incredible talent and dedication of the student-athletes who take the field at Rafferty Stadium each season, and to the yearly reinvention of the team as a whole—to see All-MAAC, All-Region, and All-America performers come and go while maintaining the program’s standard of excellence.

“We are very proud of our history, and we love to celebrate our success and our alumnae, but the current team is not last year’s team,” said Coach Field. “Once we are all on campus in September, we don’t talk about the past; we put away our rings and championship T-shirts. The only things we bring with us year-to-year are our expectations and our experience.”

That experience has carried the Stags annually from an arduous non-conference schedule through the two-month grind of league play and the high stakes of MAAC Championship Weekend.

In 2022, a down year by the program’s own lofty standards, Fairfield lost three consecutive MAAC games for the first time in nearly two decades and entered the postseason as the fourth seed. The Stags needed a quarterfinal victory just to reach Championship Weekend, then traveled to Siena for the MAAC semifinals rather than hosting it at Rafferty Stadium.

“We walked into the hotel and one of our seniors, Caroline Mangan ’22 [now an assistant coach], looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ve been here before,’” Coach Field recalled. “That’s something you can’t manufacture. That level of leadership and experience from your upperclassmen needs to be earned before it can be passed on.” Cast in the unfamiliar role of underdog, the Stags defeated the top two teams that weekend to hoist the conference trophy. They then pushed No. 4 Syracuse to the brink before falling 12-11 in one of the most thrilling first-round games of that year’s NCAA tournament.

Perhaps the most acclaimed Fairfield women’s lacrosse team was also the only one in the past eight years that didn’t win a MAAC Championship. The 2024 Stags earned the first two wins over nationally ranked opponents in program history, defeating No. 24 UConn and No. 23 UAlbany in consecutive February outings. They earned their own national ranking for the first time in 15 years and rolled into MAAC Championship Weekend as the overwhelming favorite, carrying a 16-1 record and a No. 22 ranking into the title game against Niagara—a team they had defeated 14-7 just six weeks earlier.

After a back-and-forth championship game, it was the Purple Eagles who celebrated at Rafferty Stadium while the Stags saw their annual path to the NCAA Tournament thrown into doubt. But Fairfield’s lone blip on an otherwise remarkable season résumé was not enough to sway the national committee. On Selection Sunday, the Stags received the first at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament in program history.

“To lose the MAAC in 2024 and still talk about that year as the best season we’ve had is fitting, because that’s what being a nationally ranked team is,” Coach Field said. “You’re going to take losses along the way, but your body of work is still strong enough to have earned that respect from your peers. The at-large bid is when we felt like we had arrived at where we want to be.”

“Where we want to be” is a moving target for Fairfield Women’s Lacrosse. And after eight consecutive seasons of NCAA trips—all concluding with an opening round loss—the next benchmark for the Stags is clear.

“There are successes along the way, but there’s one main goal. We want to win that first-round game and advance in the NCAA Tournament,” said Coach Field. “We don’t take for granted anything we’ve accomplished, but there’s always that next step. And we’re going to reinvent and evolve and put in the work until we get there. And then we’ll see what’s next.”

Related Stories