Lancers suffer first home defeat of season
Published 8:28 pm Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Longwood University’s men’s basketball team is undefeated at home no more, a Longwood athletics press release reported Saturday.
Visiting Charleston Southern University, now 7-9 overall and 1-2 in the Big South Conference, snapped the Lancers’ seven-game home win streak with a 101-91 win Saturday afternoon in Willett Hall, putting an end to the best home start by a Longwood team since the 1993-94 Lancers went a perfect 13-0, officials said.
The release continue by noting that the Bucs’ two 20-point scorers sparked an overwhelming offensive effort that saw Charleston Southern put up triple digits against a Longwood team that entered the game as the Big South’s top-rated defensive squad, leading the league in both opponent scoring and opponent field goal percentage.
“This was probably the first game that I felt like we got out-toughed,” Lancers first-year Head Coach Griff Aldrich said in the release. “It was the first game I felt like we didn’t have competitive fire. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at — we got down by about eight, and it was like the balloon got deflated. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘That’s not our team. All we have to do is make a couple stops, and we’re OK.’ But it was almost like that toughness and fight got zapped.”
Officials cited in the release that the loss came less than 48 hours after the Lancers gutted out a 67-62 win against Big South foe University of North Carolina (UNC) at Asheville on Thursday in Willett Hall.
However, Saturday it was Charleston Southern that won in crunch time, turning a four-point lead with seven minutes to play into double digits by the five-minute mark, the release stated.
The Bucs’ overall effort overshadowed a hot-shooting effort by the Lancers, who shot 50 percent (28-of-56) from the field and 50 percent (14-of-28) from three-point range and got 21 points from redshirt senior guard Isaiah Walton, officials highlighted. Walton added a season-high six assists and scored his 1,000th career point in the loss, becoming only the 22nd player in school history, and seventh in the 15-year Division I era, to reach that benchmark.
Longwood (11-7, 1-2 Big South) visits Winthrop University on Wednesday at 7 p.m.