Longwood’s win is a painful reminder that the Big South doesn’t revolve around Winthrop
There was a moment in the first half, with the game’s margin ballooning to 21 points, when the oldest players on one of the oldest teams in the country squinted at the scoreboard in disbelief.
Winthrop senior guard Micheal Anumba looked. So did graduate transfers Patrick Good and Drew Buggs. Third-year players DJ Burns, Chase Claxton and Russell Jones Jr. — three guys who’d never played a Winthrop season without finishing it with a Big South tournament championship win — looked up, too, trying to calculate how big the comeback they were about to make would be.
“All year, we’ve been going through a lot of stuff with the team,” said an inconsolable, teary Cory Hightower postgame. “We had a lot of close games, so I never felt like we were out of the games. So I mean, no matter what, no matter what we’re going through, I felt like we were going to win.”
The comeback, of course, never came.
The Big South conference tournament was instead won by Longwood, the league’s regular-season champion, in a dominant 79-58 showing of discipline and dominance and destiny.
And yet, once the final buzzer rang, a strange feeling lingered.
For those who’ve been attuned to Winthrop for only the past few years — including last year, which saw myriad broken records and national attention and a 12 seed in the NCAA Tournament — the final score of Winthrop’s final game of the 2021-22 season served as an eerie and painful reminder that the Big South men’s basketball conference doesn’t revolve around Winthrop.
Let’s be clear: It’s a compliment to the Winthrop basketball program that it has been the league’s protagonist for so long. The team, after all, has won the last two Big South tournaments. And before that, Winthrop made four title appearances between 2013-17.
The Eagles have made 11 NCAA Tournaments since 1999. (Since 1999!)
But Winthrop wasn’t the league’s protagonist this year. In a way this year’s players and coaches aren’t accustomed to, Sunday wasn’t Winthrop’s moment.
The season and moment instead belonged to Longwood.
It belonged to Griff Aldrich, a former-lawyer-turned-coach who in four years has turned a bottom-feeding program into a championship one.
It belonged to Isaiah Wilkins, who’d started his career at Virginia Tech and then Wake Forest before arriving in Farmville in 2021 and getting a chance to go back to the Big Dance.
It belonged to Justin Hill, Longwood’s indelible sophomore guard who earned the most amount of first-place votes for Big South Player of the Year but still fell a few total votes short of the moniker. (Winthrop’s DJ Burns, instead, was named POY earlier this week.)
It belonged to the entire Lancers team, one that shot 52.8% from the field and 58.8% from 3 on championship Sunday.
Head coach Mark Prosser began his introductory news conference by giving credit to Longwood for the season it had and the years-long ascension it has been on.
“We’ve talked about it,” Prosser said postgame, “I don’t know how many teams have gone through this league with one loss, including the tournament.”
The last team to do that, of course, was Winthrop in 2020-21 — a team that, in the relatively short-term memory of college basketball, has more often than not been the Big South’s darling.
The Big South, for the season and for the moment, belongs to Longwood. There wasn’t much Winthrop could’ve done on Sunday to derail that. And there isn’t anything Winthrop can do in the next few months to rectify that, either, that is, until the league crowns a champion again.
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