The Opening Tip
•   Longwood enters the 2017 Big South Championship as the No. 9 seed and will face No. 8 seed Charleston Southern in the first round. The Lancers are 2-1 as the No. 9 seed in the Big South Championship.
•   Longwood is 4-4 all-time in the Big South Tournament, including 3-3 under head coach
Jayson Gee. The Lancers have advanced past the first round in three of the four tournaments they have played in, including a trip to the semifinals in 2015 after upsetting No. 1 seed Charleston Southern.
•   Longwood is down to just seven available scholarship players after a rash of injuries.
Bryan Gee (overtraining syndrome),
Damarion Geter (foot),
Jahleem Montague (knee) and
Juan Munoz (knee) are all out with major injuries, while Kendrick Thompson is out for academic reasons.
Last Time Out
•   Charleston Southern used a pair of 20-point games from Cortez Mitchell and Armel Potter to outlast Longwood's furious second-half rally and spoil
Darrion Allen and Issac Belton's Senior Day with an 86-78 win over the Lancers Saturday afternoon in Willett Hall.
•   The Buccaneers used a monstrous first half to build a 22-point lead, but Longwood, led by a game-high 27 points from
Khris Lane, 23 from Allen and a season-high 14 from Belton, stormed back to cut that deficit to just one point with 6:24 left in the game.
•   Following a timeout, however, Charleston Southern countered Longwood's 38-19 run with a 20-13 run of its own and scored eight points from the free throw line in the final 1:04 to pull away to their third win in the past four games.
By The Numbers
•   Two Lancers earned All-Big South honors for the first time in the program's five years as a member of the conference. Redshirt junior forward
Khris Lane earned All-Big South second team recognition, while senior guard
Darrion Allen earned a spot on the honorable mention team.
•   Longwood has had an All-Big South first or second-team player in three straight seasons.
•   Longwood enters its fifth postseason as a member of the Big South. The Lancers have advanced out of the first round of the Big South Championship in three of their first four years as a member of the conference, including back-to-back seasons under head coach
Jayson Gee in 2014-15 and 2015-16.
•   The Lancers have squared off against Charleston Southern in the Big South Championship in each of the past two tournaments, beating the Buccaneers in both games. In 2014-15, ninth-seeded Longwood upset the top-seeded Bucs 68-60 in the quarterfinals. Last season, the eighth-seeded Lancers pulled out a 75-69 win over the ninth-seeded Bucs in the first round.
•   Longwood is 2-1 as the No. 9 seed in the tournament. The last time Longwood earned the No. 9 seed, they took down eight-seeded Presbyterian and top-seeded Charleston Southern to advance to the semifinals for the first time in the Big South era before falling to fifth-seeded Winthrop.
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Darrion Allen has played in all six of Longwood's Big South Championship games over the past three seasons and average 8.0 points per game in those contests. He scored in double figures in both games last season, averaging 16.5 points in those contests with a 22-point effort in the first-round win over Charleston Southern.
•   Longwood has dressed just seven players in back-to-back games. Junior forward
Obi Romeo missed the past two games with an illness, leaving the already-short-handed Lancers with only six available scholarship players.
•   Longwood ranks second in the Big South with 4.1 blocks per game and has three players —
Khris Lane (1.2 bpg.),
JaShaun Smith (1.1), and
Darrion Allen (0.8) — ranked among the Big South's top 10 in blocks per game.
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