FARMVILLE, Va. – Longwood opened December the same way it did November, with a double-digit win in front of its home crowd in Willett Hall.
 
Only this time instead of kicking off the new era of Longwood basketball under first-year head coach Griff Aldrich, the Lancers extended what has become a month-long celebration of the best start of the program's Division I era.
 
Propelled by a career-high 23 points and the first career double-double from junior guard Shabooty Phillips, Longwood dispatched VMI 65-45 to improve to 6-3 for the program's best nine-game start since making the jump to the Division I level 15 years ago.
 
Phillips scored all 23 of his points during a runaway second half in which the Lancers strung together a 17-0 run and outscored VMI 37-22 en route to the team's first win over the Keydets since Dec. 12, 2011. The win was the third straight for the Lancers, who are now a perfect 3-0 on Jerome Kersey Court. But even with Phillips' second-half takeover and an 18-point night from JaShaun Smith, it was Longwood's defense that stood out at the star of the team's most recent win, just as it has all season long.
 
"That was a team that averaged 80-plus a game to date, and to be able to hold them to 45 is a heck of a performance," said Aldrich, whose Lancers now trail only 6-1 Radford for the best winning percentage in the Big South.
 
"The job JaShaun [Smith] and Shabooty did on [Bubba Parham], he had averaged over 30 a game the past four games, and to hold him to seven tonight is a really good night. But I think you'd be remiss if you didn't talk about Spencer Franklin, Damarion Geter and Pernell Adgei. We really play team defense, and they did a great job being right there on the screens. I'm betting Bubba Parham's going to have visions of those three in his dreams tonight. They did a great job being right at the level of the screen throughout the evening."
 
VMI (5-4) entered the matchup ranked among the Southern Conference's top four in scoring and three-point field goal percentage but ran into the buzzsaw that has become Longwood's Big South-leading defense. The Lancers held the Keydets to season lows of 45 points, .270 (17-of-63) shooting from the field and .182 (6-of-33) from three-point range to join Pitt, Kentucky and American as the only teams to defeat them this season.
 
Holding Parham, the NCAA's ninth-leading scorer, in check was key to that performance, and, as Aldrich noted, it took five players to do so. With Phillips meeting Parham at the point of attack on the bulk of the possessions, VMI's leading scorer shot just 2-of-15 from the field and 1-of-10 from three-point range.
 
Phillips outdueled his sophomore counterpart by knocking down 8-of-19 shots from the field, hitting all eight of those shots on just 13 attempts after halftime. He scored nine consecutive points early in the second half and 14 total during a 17-0 Longwood run that expanded the Lancers' lead from 28-23 to 45-25 by the 14-minute mark.
 
That second-half start was in stark contract to Longwood's performance to start the game, in which the Lancers opened 0-for-9 from the field and didn't hit their first field goal until Adgei's putback at the 14:05 mark. However, the Lancers kept shooting and hit 4-of-9 three-pointers the rest of the way to build a 28-23 halftime lead.
 
"It's what coach preaches to us: Go out and play hard," Phillips said. "Focus and effort, those are the two main things we focus on. When we're missing, he's still saying they're great shots, keep shooting, and they'll fall. The first half we were like 27 percent from the field, and the second half we were 52. We just have to keep on shooting the ball, and they'll go in."
 
Those shots fell to the tune of 7-of-9 during the 17-0 run that broke the game open, and Longwood led by no fewer than 12 points the rest of the way. And even after the Keydets cut Longwood's 20 points to 12 with 5:44 to play, Phillips and Smith scored Longwood's next six points and capped that bounceback run with a Smith slam to expand that lead back to 18 entering the final four minutes.
 
"Basketball is a game of runs, and the key is to minimize your poor runs and elongate your good runs," Aldrich said. "I thought tonight we did a pretty good job of having a nice long run, experiencing a poor run and then bouncing back. You do that through defense. You can shoot your way out of it, but for us, our mantra and philosophy is going to be to defend."
 
Now 3-0 at home, the Lancers will get nearly a week to prepare for their next matchup, another home bout against Frostburg State next Friday, Dec. 7. That game will tip off at 7 p.m. in Willett Hall.
 
#GoWood