ALBANY, N.Y. – The weakness for this Stags team all season long has been the snowball effect. When a few shots don't fall, Fairfield has been in danger of compounding those misses, which turn into a poor quarter. Unfortunately, this fact reared its ugly head and hit a climax in the biggest game of the season. The Stags scored two points in the second quarter and shot 3-for-32 during a 20-minute stretch and fell to the fifth-seeded Monmouth Hawks 64-46 in the Quarterfinals of the 2016 MAAC Tournament.

“Monmouth is too good of a basketball team for us to go through the drastic drought that we had in the second quarter,” Head Coach Joe Frager said. “That was tough to battle back from.”

The fourth-seeded Stags (16-14, 11-9 MAAC) went into what would be the deciding second quarter, with a 16-15 lead after shooting 47 percent from the floor. Monmouth (14-16, 11-9 MAAC) used their prototypical 3-point shooting to propel them during those first 10 minutes, hitting three of their nine long-range attempts in the period. A Casey Smith basket with three seconds remaining gave the Stags momentum and the one-point lead.

But that poor quarter would come to the forefront as the Stags scored two points in the second quarter, going 1-for-17 from the floor during the period, including a 0-for-5 mark from deep. The athletic Hawks took full advantage scoring 19 points in the frame, on 7-for-15 shooting from the field. Fairfield didn't score for the first 6:12 of the quarter, as Monmouth opened up a 14-point lead.

“In that second quarter we had four or five really good looks,” Frager said. “If a couple of those shots dropped, it's not such a wipeout quarter. The game is much more in reach and much more manageable in those circumstances. When we missed a few of those open shots, we got a little bit panicky and a little of our decision making went that way.”

The offensive struggles continued in the third quarter as the Stags hit just one of their first 12 shots, allowing Monmouth to grab their largest lead of the game at 25 points.

For the game, Kelsey Carey led a trio of Stags in double figures with 15 points, while Smith had 14. Samantha Cooper recorded her eighth career double-double with 10 points and a game-high 12 rebounds. Lizzy Ball finished with a game-high eight assists and will probably end the season as the MAAC's leader in assists per game, the first Stag to accomplish that feat in two decades. Ball also moved up to a tie for fifth on the Fairfield single season list with 173 assists in her first season as a starting point guard.

Monmouth had balance throughout the stat sheet with eight different players scoring and 11 grabbing a rebound. Tyese Purvis was tops on the team with 14 points

The Stags will await to see if their season will continue, as Fairfield hopes to get selected for a spot in the Women's Basketball Invitational (WBI). If they don't, this loss concludes a season where the Stags finished with a winning MAAC record for the 10th-straight season, nine of those coming under Frager, the only coach in MAAC history to do that to begin a career.

It will also be the endings to the brilliant careers of Ball and Kristin Schatzlein. Ball became one of the best stories in the MAAC, finally getting her chance to see significant minutes after being a back-up point guard for her first three seasons. She made the most of her opportunity, currently leading the conference in assists and assist-turnover ratio, a stat she is in the top-10 nationally in. In just one season, Ball will finish fourth all-time in conference history in assist-turnover ratio for a career.

Schatzlein will go down as one of the best shooters in program history and showed her competitive toughness today, playing in a game despite being hobbled by an injury that forced her status to be questionable until game time.

The Stags will return three starters to a team next year that Coach Frager hopes shows another quality: toughness.

“They're a great group of young women there's no doubt about that,” Frager said. “They're a bunch of great kids. From a coaching standpoint I'd like to see them get a bit nastier. We're going to place a big emphasis on physical strength in the offseason. I do think three or four of the teams physically shoved us around a little bit. That's going to change next year.”