By Dave Stewart
MaxPreps.com
FAIRFIELD, Conn. – Sabrina Siciliano managed to offer a smile through a cough after her Fairfield-Warde Mustangs had beaten Stamford 56-42 for the FCIAC girls basketball championship Thursday night. The senior co-captain was battling an illness, but she surely felt a little bit better given her team’s long-sought-after victory.
“I’m ecstatic right now. You probably can’t tell right now because I’m sick, but it’s a great feeling and I’m really happy,” Siciliano laughed.
If Siciliano’s performance during the FCIAC final is any indication of how well she does when she’s sick, Warde’s Class L opponents better hope she gets well real soon.
Siciliano racked up 14 points to spark a second half rally as the Warde Mustangs completed an undefeated run through the conference schedule and claimed the FCIAC championship with a 56-42 victory over the Stamford Black Knights at Fairfield-Ludlowe High School.
Siciliano, who will play at Assumption next winter, was named the tournament MVP after posting a double-double with 14 points and 13 rebounds to go along with six steals and five assists. Siciliano, who had 37 points in Warde’s regular-season win over Stamford, was held scoreless in the first half before breaking out with seven in the third quarter.
Senior co-captain Daphne Elliott, who will play for Jen Rizzotti at Hartford next winter, also had a big night as she scored a game-high 17 points and was a perfect 8-for-8 from the free throw line. Free throws were a big factor down the stretch for the Mustangs, who hit 12-of-14 in the fourth quarter.
The Mustangs’ last league title came 11 years ago in 1998, before Fairfield High School was split into two schools.
“For me, any big accomplishment is sort of surreal at the moment and it’ll probably take me a while to let it sink in,” Siciliano said. “In about a month or a year, I’ll start thinking we are FCIAC champions and realize what we’ve accomplished. But right now, it feels really good. The crowd was amazing — I loved how everybody came out and made it such a good vibe.”
Fairfield-Warde, the top seed in the Class L tournament which begins Tuesday, is now 23-0 this season and has won all but two games by at least 12 points. Coach David Danko’s team was the preseason favorite to wrest the league title away from three-time champion Trinity Catholic, but getting from point ‘A’ to the championship without a blemish was even more than outsiders could have expected.
“I never really looked at it like that,” Elliott said. “We never said we’re going to go 23-0 or things like that. We just played game by game. The first game went by, then the second game and we just kept going and working hard. Coach Danko had his speeches between the 10th game and the 15th game and he said ‘we can do this, seniors. If we work hard we can go undefeated.’ It feels good for us and all the varsity players to go undefeated.”
The Mustangs’ six seniors — co-captains Siciliano and Elliott, Rachel Friedman, Emily Bengermino, Ally Schneider and Lindsey Imperoli — had been in big games before, as the Mustangs lost in the semifinals in each of the past two seasons. Danko said the hard work put in during the offseasons is what pushed Warde over the top this year.
“With the lifting that they do, the three sports that they play, the AAU that they play with me, for most of these kids, it’s started when they were 11 or 12 years old,” Danko said. “They developed themselves and they have a good bond. The parents believed in me, they believed in what I was saying. You hear bad things about situations with parents sometimes, but they’ve allowed me into their lives, and we’ve prospered. It’s a great success story of accomplishing goals.
“We’ve been in the FCIAC semis before, and last year we had Trinity beat up until the last few minutes, but we couldn’t score. We kept getting to that mountain and not going over the top. These girls persevered, they worked hard, I’ve got two college basketball players and I’ve got a lot of other girls who put in the time and effort. Basketball is a team sport and we just reap the benefits of all their hard work.”
Friedman nearly had a double-double with nine points and 12 rebounds, while Schneider scored six points, Bengermino and junior Alex Aufiero had four each. Junior Ali Rocchi also scored two points.
Stamford, which is 17-4 this year, received a strong effort from senior tri-captain Fiona O’Dwyer, who had a double-double with 11 points and 11 rebounds while also blocking three shots. Sophomore Jasmine Jones was also big for the Knights with nine points and 11 rebounds, while senior tri-captains Katie Pape and Lauren Beluk, and Theresa Britt had five points each.
Stamford held Warde scoreless for eight minutes in the first half and had a 7-point lead before the Mustangs closed the second quarter with a 9-3 run. Friedman hit a 3-pointer, just her second trey of the season, in the final seconds to close the deficit to one point, 22-21 at halftime.
“It was a boost for our morale. We were chasing one instead of four,” Danko said of Friedman’s shot. “I told the kids ‘you need to pick this up. You seniors know the pace of the game you need to create.’”
After beating Stamford by 28 points, 70-42, on February 16, the Mustangs were impressed with how well the Knights bounced back for the title game.
“We weren’t expecting this game to be as tough as it was,” Siciliano said. “Stamford played a really good game. During the regular season, we were able to pull away a lot quicker, so this was definitely more of a challenge tonight.”
“It basically came down to tempo,” Danko said. “In the first half, we couldn’t do that. That’s a credit to Stamford of spreading us out. Fiona O’Dwyer was really hot in the first half.”
“Coming in we knew that it wasn’t going to be an easy game,” Elliott said. ‘We played Stamford last week and beat them by 30 points and we knew that they weren’t going to be the same team that we played last week. We came in pretty confident, maybe a little nervous because it was the FCIAC finals and it was our first time here as seniors, but we kept our composure.”
At halftime, Danko called on his seniors to take control of their destiny and the halftime talk seemed to refocus the Mustangs.
“We said this is out last chance,” Elliott said. ‘Coach Danko looked into our eyes and said, ‘Seniors, this is on you.’ That really made us think — we have to win this game. We will win this game, we want to win this game, we deserve this game. This was what we’ve been working for the last four years, maybe even more. This is a good thing we have here.”
“We didn’t get too carried away or get too flustered,” Siciliano said. “We knew we could come out stronger in the second half. We weren’t really worried because we knew if we played our game we could come back. We weren’t that hot in the first half, but we didn’t stress and we kept our cool.”
Siciliano quickly put the Mustangs in front with a bucket to start an 8-0 run which gave Warde a 29-22 lead. The rally included two baskets from Aufiero, who sat the entire first half but entered the game with a hot hand.
“Here’s a kid who had to sit the whole first half, comes in and hits two baskets at a key part of the game,” Danko said. “You could see the kid’s eyes light up and she got the pressure going. That was a complement for us, but that’s how our team has been the whole year.”
Stamford’s Jones scored an offensive rebound and put-back to snap the slide, but Siciliano came back to hit a 3-pointer and made it 32-24.
The Mustangs’ pressure gave Stamford fits in the second half, forcing numerous turnovers to change the tide of the game.
“The defense is how we score, really,” Siciliano said. “We get the turnovers, we press the entire game and we score off our defense. The pressure creates turnovers so we can get the interception and the easy lay-ups. It’s definitely a big part of what we do and how we score.”
“Defense helps us keep focused on what we have to do,” Elliott said. “We turned them over, we tried to score off that and we win off our defense. Defense is the No. 1 thing in basketball and if you don’t play defense, you’re going to win games.”
Stamford was able to overcome those turnovers and stay within striking distance. The Knights trailed by five, 36-31, after three quarters, and each time Warde appeared to be pulling away, Stamford came up with a big play.
Down 42-34 early in the fourth, O’Dwyer hit a lay-up, drew a foul and hit the free throw for a 3-point play to make it a 5-point game.
After Warde went back up by nine at 46-37, Jones hit two huge baskets to again make it a 5-point game at 46-41 with four minutes remaining.
The Mustangs, however, were not to be denied and nailed down the victory from the free throw line in the closing minutes.
“That’s the way we’ve played all year,” Danko said. “My motto was eventually we’re going to get you. We’re on a team which goes on many runs, and that’s what opened it up and kept us in the lead. We hit some key free throws down the stretch and that was the ball game.”
For the players, especially the six seniors, the championship was a long time coming.
“We’ve been together since sophomore season,” Siciliano said. “We didn’t have a lot of seniors in ’07 and ’06, so we started off together as sophomores. We’re friends on and off the team, with or without basketball, we have great chemistry and I think that comes onto the court with us.”
“These seniors, the six of them, can take a good memory of a good tournament, and they can identify with their State championship soccer team,” Danko said. “Now they’ve got an FCIAC girls’ basketball banner that they can look up there and be proud of. They’ve accomplished something that we’ve looked forward to for the past four years with this group.”
Dave Stewart, the Sports Editor of the New Canaan (Conn.) Advertiser, is a MaxPreps.com writer and photographer. He may be reached at 203-966-9541 or at sports@ncadvertiser.com
