The William & Mary field hockey looks to continue building momentum toward the post-season this weekend, with a road trip through southern New England to finish out the regular season.  The Tribe will play at Fairfield on Friday afternoon at 3 p.m., before finishing out against CAA-rival Hofstra on Sunday at noon.  Live stats and live audio/video for both matches is available through TribeAthletics.com.

Scouting the Tribe
W&M went 2-0 last weekend on the road to even its season-record at 8-8, and clinched a top-two finish in the CAA at 4-1 with the overtime win against No. 17 James Madison.  Junior Cammie Lloyd (Midlothian, Va.) has been responsibly for a big portion of the Tribe's success, and earned CAA Player of the Week honors for the second time after accounting for two goals and two assists last week.  She now has 32 points on 13 goals and six assists this season, fourth in the league and the most for any W&M player since Kelly Giles '06 had 14 goals and six assists to earn CAA Player of the Year honors in 2004.  On defense, junior Erin Menges (Richmond, Va.) ranks top-seven in the nation with four defensive saves, and freshman Morgan Connor (Bedford, N.Y.) has 78 saves and a 2.47 GAA while playing every minute in goal.

Scouting the Stags
Fairfield is 5-12 on the season and 3-2 in the MAAC, and has won four of its last six matches.  Offensively, Ann Burgoyne (10g, 6a) leads five players with 10 or more points on the season, and Corrine Baliga has three defensive saves.  In goal, Caitlin Bennett has played all but one game with a 2.52 GAA and 86 saves.

Scouting the Pride
Hofstra enters the weekend at 9-8 overall and 1-3 in the CAA, and losers of four in a row.  The Pride will take on James Madison on Friday afternoon to try and keep pace in the race for the CAA Tournament.  The high-powered Hofstra offense has six players with more than 10 points on the year, led by seniors Claudia Marin Samper (18g, 12a) and Stella Schoen (13g, 6a).  In goal, Lauren Saltus has the majority of minutes with a 2.59 GAA and 64 saves, while Carys Swan has played in eight games with a 4.07 GAA and 35 saves.

The Series
- This will be just the second meeting ever with Fairfield, and the first in Connecticut.  In the only other match-up, the 2007 Tribe team won 5-0 in Williamsburg.
- The series with Hofstra is weighted 9-7 in favor of W&M, including a 4-2 advantage in Hempstead.  The Tribe has won three of the last four meetings, including two in a row on the road, while the Pride won 3-2 last season in Williamsburg.

News and Notes
- With the regular season down to its final weekend, the race for the Colonial Athletic Association Tournament has hit a frenzied pace.  Delaware (4-0) and W&M (4-1) have already clinched spots in the field, while the other five teams are all still alive for the final two places.  JMU is ahead at the moment, 3-2, and can clinch with a win over Hofstra on Friday.  Drexel is 2-2 with matches against Towson (0-4) and Delaware this weekend, while Northeastern (Towson, Delaware) and Hofstra (JMU, W&M) are both at 1-3 overall.

- In addition to the fight just to make the tournament, the question of regular season champion and No. 1 seed (and tournament host) is still very much up for debate.  Delaware, No. 9 in the national polls, currently has the inside track and can guarantee its top spot with one win this weekend.  If the Blue Hens lose one, it opens the door for W&M to tie for the regular season championship with a win over Hofstra (Delaware would still host and be No. 1-seeded thanks to its 3-2 overtime win against the Tribe).  If Delaware were to lose twice and W&M win, then the Tribe would win the regular season outright and host the CAA Championships next weekend.  To further complicate matters, there is another scenario where Delaware and W&M could be lose all three of their matches this weekend, and then it devolves to tiebreakers and records against other teams to determine who hosts.

- Freshman Cassidy Goodwin (Gloucester, Va.) was named the CAA Rookie of the Week on Oct. 25, after scoring two goals in the 5-4 win over VCU on the road.  She is the third different Tribe freshman to be named Rookie of the Week, leading the conference and setting an all-time program record.

- W&M has won a total of seven CAA weekly awards this season thanks to five different players, both CAA-best totals with one week still to come.  The team has also broken or tied several all-time school records for the awards program, including most Players of the Week (3, matching the 2002 team), most Rookies of the Week (4, most-ever), most total honors (7), most players honored (5), most players to win Player of the Week (2, matching the 1998, 2003, and 2012 teams), and most players to win Rookie of the Week (3).  Additionally, with her two Player of the Week awards this season, Lloyd has matched Ann Ekberg '03 and Kelly Giles '06 for the most career CAA weekly awards, with three total.

- In addition to Lloyd and Goodwin this week, previous weekly award winners include Emma MacLeod (Richmond, Va.), Player of the Week on Oct. 18, Lloyd Player of the Week on Oct. 4, Connor Rookie of the Week on Sept. 20, and Annie Snead (Midlothian, Va.) Rookie of the Week on both Sept. 13 and Oct. 4.

- The Tribe's 4-3 overtime win against No. 17 JMU last week was its first ranked win of the season, and the first over a ranked team since 2013.

- W&M is one just three teams to score more than two goals against current No. 1 Duke this season.  The Tribe tallied four goals against the then-No. 4 Blue Devils back in August in the season opener, while then-No. 4 Syracuse scored five in early October and then-No. 5 North Carolina had three in late September.  Both those ACC teams achieved that feat on their home fields, however, leaving W&M as the only team to score more than two against Duke in Durham.  In fact, the Green and Gold's four goals are almost as many as the other six teams to play there scored combined (six).

- W&M leads the CAA and ranks seventh nationally with 10 defensive saves.  Including Menges' four, the Tribe also has two each from Booter Ellis (Delmar, Del.) and Caroline Arrowood (Chesapeake, Va.), as well as single saves from captain Maddy Moore (Norfolk, Va.) and freshman Christie van de Kamp (Midlothian, Va.).

- The last time W&M finished conference play with one or fewer conference losses was the 7-0 season in 2004.

- 2004 was also the last time the Tribe was seeded first or second in the CAA Tournament.

- W&M is currently on pace to set a program-record for most points per game in a season, and close to record-pace in goals and assists as well.  The Tribe is averaging 7.69 points per game, ahead of the school-record pace of 7.45 a game set in 2000.  W&M is also averaging 2.88 goals per game, fifth all-time and the best since 1977, and 1.94 assists per game, second-best behind only the 2012 team that averaged 2.32 per game. 

- The Tribe's 8-1 win over Towson saw a number of historically ranked performances.  It was the second-most points ever scored by W&M in a game (22), trailing only the 23 points scored against Lehigh in 1990, and also tied for the second-most assists in a single game (6), behind only nine helpers against Ursinus in 1994.  The eight goals scored by the Tribe were tied for third-most ever, behind nine goals in the 1990 Lehigh game and against Old Dominion in 1974, and the 45 shots taken were sixth-most ever, and the most since 1992.

- Junior Estelle Hughes (Newcastle, NSW) scored the first goal against Towson just 23 seconds into the contest.  That's the second-fastest goal in school history, trailing only the 21-seconds it took for senior captain Maria Jose Pastor (Burke, Va.) to score against against Temple in 2014.

- The shoot-out win over Davidson was notable for a number of reasons.  It was W&M's first shoot-out game of any sort since 2008, and the first win for the Tribe in a shoot-out since 1993.  All-time, the Tribe is now 5-5 in games decided by a shoot-out.

- The win over Richmond was the Tribe's first since the 2007 season.

- Connor's 11 saves against No. 4 Duke in the season opener, a freshman record for W&M, were the most for any Tribe goalie since the 2014 season opener.

- Head coach Tess Ellis is in her fourth season with the Tribe, and has twice been named the CAA Coach of the Year (in both 2013 and 2014).

- Three Tribe juniors all earned pre-season honors from the CAA, with Ellis earning a spot on the first team, and classmates Lloyd and Menges being named honorable mention.

- This is the first season since 1986 that W&M enters the season with no previous game experience in goal.  That actually bodes pretty well for the Tribe, given that the 1986 season marked the debut for both Carlen Sellers '89 and Sharon Barone '90.  Sellers would set the still-standing career records for save percentage (.896) and goals-against average (0.87), while Barone graduated as--and is still--the all-time leader in saves (768) and saves per game (11.13), in addition to ranking second in percentage (.879) and shut-outs (25.5).

- Back in the spring, W&M had three freshmen named among the nation's top-50 recruits by MaxFieldHockey.com, one of just six schools in the entire country to achieve that feat.  Goodwin, Snead, and van de Kamp were the selections, and later in the summer, teamed up under assistant coach Mark Egner at the Young Women's National Championships to roll to an undefeated national title in the U19 division.