To celebrate this time of giving and sharing, Fairfield University Athletics looks back on a year of community service by its student-athletes. Eleven stories will be featured through the end of the month, showcasing the student-athletes commitment to Service for Others.
It's a good thing that
Joe Frager uses a dry erase board in the team locker room. The head women's basketball coach had to do a little erasing during the course of the 2017-18 season which is a good thing when it comes to raising money.
The women's basketball team has always shown a strong commitment to the Kay Yow Foundation and its Play for Kay program, an organization that raises money and awareness for breast cancer. The namesake of the program is Kay Yow, who coached women's basketball for 38 years before losing her fight with cancer.
Last year, the Stags joined the national free throw challenge where teams were solicited donations for each free throw made during the month of February. And it was during that month that Coach Frager's eraser came in handy.
"The best part about the month-long fundraiser was definitely how we wrote our team fundraising goal on the board and passed it in the first week," senior guard
Kendra Landy said. "We erased that goal and wrote a higher goal. And once reached that goal, we wrote a higher goal. We exceeded our expectations and nothing was better than watching that number go up and up each day."
It only follows that with the goal being exceeded regularly that the Stags were quite good at the free throw line, netting 92 charity tosses in their nine February games. With their per-free throw pledge solidly in place, Fairfield was able to exceed $2,500 during the four-week run. The team's fund raising total ranked fourth in the nation out of the 54 teams that accepted the free throw challenge.
"I look back to last year's fundraising with extreme pride and sense of accomplishment, knowing we raised so much money for the Kay Yow Foundation," Landy said. "But there is always room for improvement so we are excited to beat our amount from last year. Being in the top five nationally was nice, but it was more about the sense of pride we had knowing that the donations were going to a cause that is so close to all of our hearts in some way."
Coach Frager agreed with Landy's take on how cancer touches so many lives in so many ways.
"We emphasize to our players the importance of contributing to the cure in any way that we can," Coach Frager said after the completion of last year's efforts. "All of us have had someone – a relative or a close friend who's been affected by cancer."
The team relied on the support of those to them when it came to the fundraising effort. With so many affected by cancer, it didn't take much convincing when the student-athletes reached out to those in their families and communities.
"The team was able to raise money by getting word out past just Fairfield University," Landy said. 'We took it upon ourselves to reach out to family members and friends, asking them to donate to a good cause. The free throw challenge made it an even better way to raise money since so many of our close friends and family members are loyal followers of Fairfield women's basketball."
Service to others is an important part of the Fairfield University mission, a trait that is embraced by all of the Stags athletic teams. The commitment to making a difference in the community is the main reason many of the Fairfield Athletics service projects are so successful.
"We participate in service projects because we enjoy helping others and the community," Landy said. "As athletes and students at such a great university, we have the opportunity to make a difference and we take that very seriously. Not everyone is in the position to make change, so it's important that we take very opportunity to help out whenever we can."
In addition to helping raise money for the Kay Yow Foundation, the team may also need to look for a few extra dollars for a new eraser for Coach Frager. Based on last year's success, he is going to need one.
