Longwood Joins the Big South

The Big South officially welcomed the Longwood Lancers into the league last month bringing the current membership to an unprecedented 12 teams. Adding Longwood gives the league a very convenient four teams in each of its three states.

The Lancers have been a Division I independent for the last 4 1/2 years since moving up from Division II. Longwood has targeted Big South membership from the very beginning but it has taken the Big South some time to warm up to the Lancers. We can only assume the Big South was awaiting facility upgrades and proof of performance that Longwood would sustain at the DI level. With those questions now answered, adding the Lancers does make it a more balanced league (for how long is debatable).

What does it mean for Winthrop? It will make the Virginia trips a little easier, assuming your will make a VMI/Radford trip and a Liberty/Longwood trip. However, VMI doesn’t play volleyball or women’s basketball and Longwood does not play volleyball so for volleyball, no change at all, and Women’s hoops actually now has to make a second trip to Va. That it wouldn’t normally make.

Longwood will compete right away. The Lancers are very good in golf and soccer and historically have been competitive in women’s basketball and baseball. The real interesting question for the league is does the addition of Longwood mean that division play is right around the corner?

It is no surprise that the with the current 11 team lineup, the unbalanced schedule has upset a lot of coaches. Although it has worked in WU’s favor a couple of times, there are complaints that certain teams do not play the top teams and that is unfair for seeding purposes.

With division play, two-thirds of the league is broken up nicely into North and South. The Va. Schools to the North, the S.C. schools to the South, then it is just a matter of assigning the N.C. schools, the geography will not work out. If it were by geography Asheville and HPU are more Northern than GWU and Campbell, but those cannot be travel partners. So, although Asheville to the South and Campbell to the North or GWU to the North and HPU to the South would be a little strange, the travel partners have to stay together.

The next question is how many conference games do we play? Right now the number is 18 in Men’s basketball and 24 in Baseball. With divisions, MBB has to drop to 16 games (10 against your division, each team twice and 6 against the other division, each team once). Baseball to stay at 24 means you would play the teams in your division every year and then there would be three-teams in the other division you would not play.

It is all very interesting and I am sure the Big South brass will figure it out but for now, welcome Longwood and we will see you first on the soccer pitch in Fall 2012.