Excellence: On and Off the Field
They finished high school with no fanfare — no prom, no graduation, and no last big summer with longtime friends. Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, they arrived at Fairfield in August 2020 with more questions than answers – their fall season had been canceled and future plans were yet to be announced. But at a time when many firstyear college students felt lost, the Class of 2024 women’s soccer players were focused on what they had found.
“Starting at Fairfield when we did in 2020 allowed us to come together as a team really quickly. We weren’t allowed to do much, other than be with each other, and that helped us bond,” recalled Caroline Kelly ’24, one of eight rookie Stags to join the Women’s Soccer program that year.
Today, four of those Class of 2024 former rookies remain: Kelly, Sydney Corbett ’24, Allie Kirby ’24, and Elle Scott ’24. Together, they’ve helped build and define the culture of their team. Between them, they’ve got four undergraduate degrees earned and four master’s degrees in progress, nearly 50 victories on the pitch, and a legacy of stewardship and leadership. All capped off with the 2024 MAAC Championship and NCAA postseason appearance — the program’s first since 2008.
“The Class of 2024 was my first full recruiting class at Fairfield; we knew we wanted a class of impactful athletes and personalities that could help us turn a corner,” said Head Coach David Barrett, who recently completed his seventh season with the Stags and his 24th as a collegiate head coach. “We put a lot of burden on them early, sometimes with mixed results, because we needed them to be ready to drive the bus when the time came. And they have been the ones who have helped get more of their teammates on the bus every year. They changed the culture and made it more competitive. Every class of newcomers since has bought into that and continues to build on it.”
“Our mentality has always been centered on giving it our all, no matter what,” said Kirby. “When we started at Fairfield, we never knew if a game, or a whole week, or the entire season was going to be taken away from us. And we never lost that mindset during these five years.”
Throughout their undergraduate careers, the four Stags piled up accolades and honors on their individual résumés. Corbett completed her management degree as a multitime MAAC All-Academic selection. Kelly earned a pair of First Team All-MAAC nods, an All-New England Third Team honor, and was tabbed as a Scholar All-American while earning her psychology degree. Also a twotime All-MAAC honoree, Kirby graduated with honors with a degree in marketing. Scott earned three All-MAAC nods throughout her undergraduate tenure and etched her name in the record books as one of the top scorers in program history, all while completing her marketing degree and being named Fairfield University’s Women’s Scholar-Athlete of the Year for 2023-24.
In the current collegiate athletics landscape, any or all of the four could have completed their Fairfield degrees last May and taken their fifth year of eligibility — granted by the NCAA after a 2020-21 season truncated by the Covid-19 pandemic — elsewhere. But this quartet had a different calling: to write their final chapter back on Lessing Field.
“I never thought for a second about going somewhere else for a fifth year,” Corbett said. “We wouldn’t have had our teammates or our culture. It just wouldn’t be our team.”
“I think I took for granted how hard it can be for a fifth-year,” noted Coach Barrett. “Your first thought is that they’ve been around and they know the lay of the land and have everything down. But then you think about how they just graduated and most of their friends have moved on to fulltime jobs; meanwhile they’re moving back into dorms for preseason practice.”
“This group,” he continued, “stayed the course in terms of their focus and maturity, whether it was soccer or academics or just being that fifth-year presence in the locker room that our younger players came to rely on.”
