Longwood University Athletics

By CHRIS COOK
LongwoodLancers.com
 
For Longwood, 2017 is going down in history as the year the Lancer athletics program shed the label of Division I newcomer and claimed the mantle of a championship contender.
 
The strides have been big ones, and they've come across the board. The momentum began last spring with the emerging softball dynasty and a breakout for men's tennis, and is reaching culmination this fall. This weekend, both field hockey (11-5) and women's soccer (12-4-3) battle for conference championships and a chance to extend their record-breaking seasons into first-ever NCAA Tournament appearances.
 
Just over a decade after Longwood made the move to Division I athletics, 2017 is shaping up us as a key milestone in the path from merely competing at the highest level of college athletics to becoming a broad and deep program that consistently wins and vies for conference titles.
 
This season both field hockey, under 10th-year head coach Iain Byers, and women's soccer, under 24th-year head coach Todd Dyer '93, posted their highest winning percentages of the Division I era. Both are in action Friday – field hockey in Kent, Ohio, for the Mid-American Conference (MAC) semifinals against Kent State at 2 p.m. (Live Stream), and women's soccer against Liberty at 7 p.m. (Live Stream) in the Big South semifinals in Greensboro, N.C.
 
"There wasn't a single person involved in Longwood's transition to Division I that thought the move would be easy," said Longwood's 12th-year athletics director Troy Austin. "When President [Patricia] Cormier and her team put the plan together, they all knew it would be a tremendous challenge. But as any successful coach or athlete will tell you, bigger challenges mean bigger rewards."
 
Longwood's move to Division I officially began in 2002 when President Cormier notified the NCAA, via official memo, of the institution's intent to transition up from the Division II level. Full certification came in September, 2007. Longwood had been well-established in several sports by that point, but the discrepancies in talent and resources that existed between schools at the Division II and Division I levels meant any school making the transition would face challenges.
 
"Our teams knew there would be large-scale differences between a fledging Division I program like ourselves and others who had been competing at D-I for a long time," said Austin, who was named interim athletics director in August, 2006, at the start of Longwood's final transitional period to the Division I level and was later elevated to the position on a full-time basis in 2008.
 
"We took our lumps, but that's the price of admission for playing on the big stage. Eleven years is still not a very long time to be at this level, but now many of our teams have their footholds and you're starting to see the tide turn."
 
For veteran Longwood personnel who experienced the transition, watching that tide turn has been especially sweet.
 
"It takes time to build a culture," said Dyer, whose 2017 women's soccer season earned him his first career Big South Coach of the Year honors. "Going back to Division II, by the time we left [women's soccer] was at the top of the conference. Our program was at the top in team offense and team defense almost every year. We were highly rated. And then we went Division I and – it's not a perfect analogy – but it's like you have the carpet pulled out from beneath your feet. You have to start over again."
 
The longest-tenured of Longwood's active head coaches, Dyer began without a carpet beneath his feet at all. As the founder of the women's soccer program, he has held his post as head coach for 24 years, building the program from Division II startup to Carolinas-Virginia Athletic Conference (CVAC) champion by 2002.
 
However just two years after scaling that championship peak, Dyer and his fellow Lancer teams began their Division I transition, leaving Longwood back at the base of a much steeper mountain.
 
"Since 2002, it's just taken time to build that culture back up," he said. "Even early on, we've been competitive with Liberty and Radford and everyone in our league, but it takes decades to build a culture where the expectation is success every year. You have to get used to winning. We're competing against teams that have been at it for much longer than we have, but we're finally starting to establish that here."
 
Dyer's coach-of-the-year honors were just part of the program's trophy haul this year – heralding a bright future, too.  Junior defender Sydney Wallace was Big South Defensive Player of the Year, Carrie Reaver was Freshman of the Year and senior captain Teresa Fruchterman Scholar-Athlete of the Year. Each of those awards were voted on by the league's 10 women's soccer head coaches, and it marked the first time a Big South team won four of the conference's five major soccer awards in the same season.
 
The bar has also moved higher for Longwood field hockey, already a historically rich program long before the Division I era and now attracting national attention at the sport's highest level. Following a successful 2016 season with an even more successful 2017, the 11-5 Lancers are in the top 10 nationally defensively and have advanced to the MAC Championship tournament for the second straight year and the second time in program history.
 
Like Dyer, Byers says the expectation for Longwood field hockey to thrive at the Division I level is rooted in the historical success that was once the norm for the program. With a history that dates back to 1927, field hockey is one of the oldest and most accomplished of Longwood's sports. The program hangs its hat on a 1975-76 season in which they were ranked as high as No. 6 in the nation while competing in the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW).
 
"Our [field hockey] alumni know we have been a historically good program, and they want us to get back to that," said Byers, who hosted that team and other 1970s field hockey alumni at a game earlier this season.
 
"Obviously [alumni] are happy with our success this year, but it's almost an expectation they have that we should be good because we were good before. We're one of the oldest programs in the country, and when you look back at our history, especially if you're an alumna who was a part of it, it inspires a lot of pride. The more successful we are, the bigger piece of that story our teams become."
 
Longwood athletics history spans nearly a full century and now has seen its teams succeed at every level in which it has competed. Longwood baseball has been to two College World Series; Longwood women's golf won three National Golf Coaches Association National Championships in the 1980s and 90s; Longwood men's golf was the first team to advance to an NCAA Division I postseason, reaching the NCAA East Regional in 2007; Longwood lacrosse played in an NCAA National Championship; Longwood men's basketball went to four NCAA Tournaments and an NCAA Final Four, and Longwood women's basketball went to four NCAA Tournaments of their own.
 
And even at the Division I level, where football and men's basketball dominates the national landscape, Longwood's women's sports have continued to stand prominently at the front of Longwood's charge, a fitting recognition for a university that for more than three-quarters of its 179-year history was an all-women's school.
 
"Our Division I success started with our men's golf team reaching an NCAA Regional in 2007 and has been sustained by coach [Kathy Riley] and softball," Austin said. "The remarkable, sustained success they've had shows people that Longwood can compete at this level. They've won championships, they've gotten to NCAA Regional Championships, they've won games on national television. By reaching that pinnacle, they've established a championship expectation for themselves, and we're seeing our other programs start to approach that as well."
 
As 2017 has shown, the evolution of Longwood athletics into a legitimate Division I program is happening right now. Longwood softball laid the blueprint. Others will follow suit.
 
In fact, they already are.


 
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