MAAC-champion Fairfield opens NCAA Tournament play at 13th-seeded Purdue, which finished third in the Big Ten, on Thursday. Also in West Lafayette, Indiana, Ohio Valley-champion Eastern Illinois plays Marquette of the Big East. The winners play Friday. 

She also had a visiting professorship at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, that she enjoyed.

Then, last January, Todd Cress and assistant Melissa Batie-Smoose left Fairfield for San Jose State. Fairfield needed someone to guide the team in the interim.

At smaller Division I schools such as Fairfield, the coaching staff often consists of a head coach and an assistant. So when Cress and Batie-Smoose left, there wasn’t so much as a grad assistant to shepherd the Stags. It so happened that Batie-Smoose was acquainted with Somera, who worked with her husband, Michael, at Johnson & Wales. She approached Somera about possibly stepping in at Fairfield until a permanent hire could be made.

Somera agreed, working out a deal with Fairfield senior associate AD Alison Sexton to come in a couple of days a week from mid-January until spring break.

Nancy Somera

“Along the way, I’m talking with the administration about my observations and what I’m seeing,” Somera said. “And in one of those conversations, Alison Sexton … kind of jokingly says, ‘That sounds an awful lot like a coach. Are you sure you don’t want to coach this team?’

“I was kind of like, I’m good with what I’m doing.”

But there was something about being back in the gym. Being around the players. Teaching.

After some research, she found out Fairfield’s conference matches would be on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Yale, on the other hand, played its Ivy League matches Friday and Saturday nights.

So Somera could have the best of both worlds.

She could coach at Fairfield and be around for most of Maile’s matches, and, this season, Yale won its second consecutive Ivy title, and Maile Somera was named the league’s co-defensive player of the year.

“It was kind of interesting because I got to try Fairfield on,” Somera said. “A lot of times, you take a job, and you don’t really know what you’re getting. But one of the things, too, was I got a tour of the new facility, and I thought, ‘Wow. This is amazing, and we can really recruit some good players to this.’ ”

The view from the Fairfield sideline wasn’t bad either. The young Stags had a tremendous season, going 22-6 in the regular season and led the Metro Atlantic Athletic Association at 16-2, two games up on Quinnipiac. And then they beat Quinnipiac in the MAAC Championship final to claim the conference’s automatic NCAA bid. Somera became the first coach to win the MAAC in their first season since Kris Zeitler led Iona to the 2004 title.

Mikayla Haut

Five players – not a senior among them – earned all-conference honors: Sophomore outside hitter Allie Elliott and junior outside hitter Mikayla Haut were first team, junior setter Blakely Montgomery and sophomore middle blocker Maya Walker were second-team, and freshman right side Mamie Krubally landed on the all-rookie team.

Somera was struck by how tight-knit the group was and even more awed at the way senior libero/defensive specialist Kyla Berg kept the Stags organized while the coaching situation was in limbo.

Montgomery said the players were equally taken with Somera, and their workouts in the offseason helped them adjust quickly after she was hired full time in March.

“That was good for us to kind of get to know her and see her coaching style,” said Montgomery, who is from League City, Texas, who averaged 7.55 assists per set. “Whenever she did become our coach, we were already familiar with her, and she knew us, so the transition was pretty good.”

Haut agreed.

“I think we were really open to that change … We were able to be very open with her and kind of learn from each other. I think she was very good about building our confidence within ourselves.

“There’s such a positive environment here that kind of lacked before, and that played a big role in not only my own but I think everyone’s role this year.”

For her part, Somera knew she wasn’t taking over a program with no pedigree. Fairfield long has been a winning program, so there was no need to come in and re-invent the wheel. This was Fairfield’s 13th conference title.

At the same time, everything she and assistant Brendan McGourn were going to implement was new to this particular group.

“You forget when you take over a program that everyone is hearing what you’re teaching for the first time,” Somera said. “And none of us are very good at learning things the first time we hear them.

“So it was a lot of repetition, repetition, repetition. And Brendan and I would be in the office like, ‘Damn it! Are they ever going to get it?’ And, sure enough, by the end of the season, it was like, ‘Yes! They got it!’ ”

The other obstacle Somera and the Stags had to overcome was a thin roster.

After graduations and transfers, Fairfield was left with seven holdovers and seven new players. Some positions, Somera said, barely have backups. An injury anywhere would present problems. And one of those transfers was KJ Johnson, who led Fairfield in kill last year with 385, a whopping 192 more than her next closest teammate (As an aside, Johnson, who transferred to Texas State as a grad student, is also in the NCAA Tournament and leads the Bobcats with 377 kills. Her team plays SMU in the first round).

At one point, Walker and Fairfield’s other middle blocker, grad student Elle Shult, went through a revolving door of injuries: one went out of the lineup just as the other recovered from an injury and returned. Somera had to shuffle her rotation at times and nearly had Krubally move to the middle at one point.

“At times this year, it felt like we were a club volleyball team because our roster was so small,” Somera said.

Through it all, the Stags didn’t blink. They enter NCAA Tournament on a seven-match winning streak, most recently a 26-24, 25-14, 16-25, 25-20 victory over defending MAAC champ Quinnipiac.

And here’s a remarkable stat: The Stags went 18-4 in the 22 sets they played this season that were decided by two points.

“This record, this season could have looked a whole lot differently,” Somera said. “We finished the (MAAC) regular season 16-2. That could have very easily been 12-6. Two points here, two points there. That’s maybe one of the headlines for this team. They found a way to win.”

Perhaps that’s because they fell back on the many clever nuggets of wisdom Somera often dropped on them. Montgomery said the team tried to live out her mantra of playing “fast, focused and fun.”

Haut attributed the success to the team playing with “PB and J.” No, not a secret stash of sandwiches on the Fairfield bench, but “Passion, bravery and joy.”

“Those are the three key aspects no one can force you to have or play with,” said Haut, a state qualifier in track and field and — wait for it — bowling at her high school in Monroe, Michigan. “If you’re playing with all three of those at once, it’s really hard to stop a team that’s playing with passion, bravery and joy.”

Of course, a little talent helps, and the Stags have plenty. Most of it young.

Allie Elliott

Elliott, 5-foot-11 and a 2022 MAAC All-Rookie team member, averaged 2.61 kills (hitting .218) and 2.56 digs per set during the regular season. The 6-foot Haut, the 2021 MAAC Rookie of the Year, led the team with 2.77 kills per set and contributed 1.96 digs per set and 40 total blocks.

Walker , also a former all-rookie team member, led the MAAC in hitting percentage (.350). Krubally was sixth in the conference with a .243 hitting percentage and averaged 2.04 kills per set. She also had a hand in 49 total blocks.

Krubally’s addition helped to solidify the Stags’ attack. The uber-athletic product of Lucas, Texas, achieved lofty numbers despite coming off a torn ACL. She had surgery in January but assured Somera during the recruiting process that she would be ready to go come August. Somera said she would have been ecstatic to have Krubally in the lineup by mid-October.

But, sure enough, when Krubally showed up on campus for preseason workouts, she was a full go. Not even a brace on her surgically repaired knee. She needed a little time to knock off the rust, but she emerged as a force. In the MAAC final against Quinnipiac, she had 11 kills – hitting .500 with no errors – and added four blocks.

“Mamie is awesome,” Montgomery said. “She brings so much energy to the court, and she hits a really heavy ball. She’s really grown into herself, and she’s become a lot more confident. Now, she’s one of our go-tos.”

But none of that offense works without a solid back line, led by Berg and senior libero/DS Noelle Carey. Berg averages a team-leading 3.79 digs per set, and Carey, who previously played at Arkansas-Little Rock, averages 2.09 digs.

Junior Svenja Rodenbusch, from Germany via Hillsborough (Fla.) Community College, had a team-high 33 aces, and Elliott had 29.

Rodenbusch also ranks fifth on the team at 1.56 kills per set.

A Herculean challenge awaits the Stags when they play Purdue.

“We just have to play without any regrets,” she said. “Being fearless is another thing we talk about, not shying away from it but going at it head on and doing our best. We’re just going to worry about ourselves and play our volleyball, and whatever happens happens.”

Added Haut: “I think the biggest thing we’re going to focus on is serving aggressively. If we can get a bigger team out of system, it will be much easier on our defense to work around one or two hitters and not having them easily in system and trying to defend all three hitters at a fast pace.”

Regardless of what happens against Purdue, Somera already can chalk up her first season at Fairfield as a success. And it likely is just the beginning. Only three players will graduate, so the core of this group will be back.

Somera admitted that when she took the job, knowing the age of the roster, she and McGourn were looking at this as a two-year project.

“I think my expectation as a coach is to always have a team that gives themselves an opportunity to win matches and win titles,” she said. “Did we overachieve? I don’t think so. But would it have been a disappointing season if we hadn’t won? No.

“I don’t ever say I expect to win. I expect that my team goes out and plays in a manner … that is, over the course of a match, to win more points than our opponent, more sets than our opponent and, therefore, win the match.”