Big South was always Longwood's preference

For Longwood athletics director Troy Austin, the search for conference affiliation has been an exhausting, all-consuming process.

“We’ve been banging on doors for a while now,” he said. “I know I have since I’ve been here.”

Austin spoke to officials from the Atlantic Sun, the Northeast Conference, the Ohio Valley Conference, the Metro Atlantic Athletic Association and the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, among others. But in the back of his mind, the perfect fit was right in the Lancers’ backyard.

When Longwood chose to move from Division II to Division I, the Big South was its first choice. Unfortunately, Longwood’s move coincided with the Big South’s quest to add as many football-playing schools as possible.

Longwood’s stance on football hasn’t changed. The school has no plans to add the sport. But the landscape has changed, at least within the Big South Conference.

Liberty announced in December 2011 that it was conducting a feasibility study and exploring a move to the Football Bowl Subdivision. Coastal Carolina has publicly expressed interest in joining the Southern Conference, though that league rebuffed CCU’s initial advances.

Big South commissioner Kyle Kallander said Liberty’s study announcement had no bearing on Longwood’s inclusion in the league, and that the timing of the two events was coincidental. Still, the Big South has been down this road before. In the mid-90s, the league was strong at 10 members. Then Campbell, Towson, Maryland-Baltimore County and UNC Greensboro left, leaving the conference scrambling for new members.

High Point, Elon and Birmingham-Southern all came aboard as members transitioning to Division I, and at one point, the Big South was down to six full-fledged DI members.

“As we evaluated things, we looked at the landscape of the shifting sands in Division I conferences these days,” Kallander said. “Certainly, we’re aware that we need to be proactive in regards to membership.”

As Longwood has completed its transition to Division I, the Lancers will be immediately eligible for conference tournaments and championships beginning in the next academic year. Longwood’s inclusion gives the Big South 12 members, and Kallander said the conference’s athletics directors and coaches are discussing possible basketball scheduling formats and hoping for approval of one “ASAP,” he said.

Men’s teams currently play 18-game conference schedules. If the conference splits into two divisions, a 16-team schedule could be in play. There’s been talk of playing as many as 20 league games. Whatever the decision is, it has to happen quickly as coaches and administrators are trying to build schedules for next season, and they need to know how many non-conference slots need to be filled.

Longwood’s inclusion in the conference appears to be one that will be mutually beneficial.

The Lancers have operated in a bit of a black hole since moving to Division I, playing a schedule front-loaded with guarantee games and a late-season mish-mash of games against non-Division I teams and small-conference opponents taking a break from their league schedules.

Last Tuesday, the Lancers were beaten at Florida Gulf Coast. Longwood radio announcer Scott Bacon asked coach Mike Gillian about the benefits of playing a conference schedule, and he noted the chances of playing a random non-conference game on a Tuesday in Fort Myers ever again was pretty slim.

“I said, ‘Scott, that’s not correct,’” Gillian said. “I said, ‘Scott, we are never doing this again.’ We’re never going to be playing from Dec. 25-Jan. 25, eight out of nine games away. We’re never going to take 11-day, three-game bus trips through New England followed by three days at home, a bus to Eastern Kentucky and a flight to Florida. That’s never going to happen again.”

Simply playing a schedule featuring nothing but conference bus trips will cut Longwood’s travel costs considerably. The longest league trip will be the 419-mile journey from Farmville to North Charleston, S.C., to face Charleston Southern.

Though Gillian said he was always confident that Longwood would eventually secure conference affiliation, that confidence wasn’t an easy sell to 18-year-old athletes who want an opportunity to play on the sport’s biggest stage — the NCAA Tournament.

“I’ve had guys right here in my house tell me, ‘I’m coming to Longwood,’ only to change their mind a week or two later when everybody else involved in the recruiting process starts to put their two cents in about the fact that we didn’t have a league to play in,” Gillian said. “That element, that one thing that could be used in the recruiting process against us … that element is now removed. With the removal of that, we’re automatically on a level playing field.

“The next part of that now is, you’re going to be recruiting against other people who say our league is better than that league. I can fight that battle every single day. That’s nothing compared to the one we’ve been working with for the past eight years.”

One thing is certain. Longwood will be on the floor when the 2013 Big South Tournament tips off, wherever it may be. In December, the Big South presidents and CEOs approved a new combined tournament format for the men’s and women’s events to be held at a pre-determined site, either a true neutral location or a campus site.

Bids for next year’s tournament must be submitted by April 15, and the league presidents will vote on the location during the conference’s annual spring meetings.

“The coaches have been talking about the possibility of change for some time,” Kallander said. “A lot of them support rewarding regular-season performance, and there will still be some of that. The top four seeds get a bye. As coaches have changed and administrators have changed, we’ve talked about, ‘Is it time to explore something else?’

“We feel like the interest has grown in Big South basketball. So let’s give it a shot. Let’s go back to the central-site format and give it a go and see if we can make it work.”