Quinnipiac student-athletes are teaming up to support men’s soccer when the team goes up against Fairfield University in the MAAC Semifinals at 1 p.m. on Friday.

The athletes in the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) are hosting a tailgate — complete with free pizza, cookies and hot chocolate — on the basketball court by the men’s soccer field at noon. All students have to do is show up with a Q Card.

“Since it’s a home game and a big deal, we wanted to get as many teams there as possible,” said Brittney Kusmierski, a junior on the acrobatics and tumbling team. “So SAAC had the idea of making a tailgate for everyone and then kind of corralling the people over [to the field] afterward to watch the game.”

SAAC put the plan into action on Monday and the plans spread quickly, through both word of mouth and social media. Men’s soccer defenseman Erik Panzer said students have been buzzing all week about the event.

“I’ve heard people saying it’ll be like ‘real college,’ we get to tailgate, this is what you do at a big time school,” Panzer said.

The MAAC Semifinals was a “prime opportunity” for the student-athletes to get together and have the tailgate, which he said was something SAAC had wanted to do for awhile.

“At the start of the year we set out some ideas that we wanted to try and implement as an organization, and one of them was a tailgate,” Panzer said. “We didn’t know what game, but this just happened to come up and it was something that everyone really wanted to do.”

Kusmierski hopes both students and student-athletes come out to show support for the soccer team.

“On an athlete-to-athlete level we always tell our team we want them at our meets so we need to go to their games,” Kusmierski said. “So that’s kind of a big thing. As far as getting people that aren’t athletes there, the free food helps, but also the atmosphere of a tailgate will get people pumped up and excited for the game.”