HIGH POINT, N.C. – This week, Longwood men's basketball confronted its own shortcomings.
 
Mired in a four-game losing streak for the first time this season, first-year head coach Griff Aldrich lamented his team's loss of "defensive intensity and urgency" and used a welcome four-day break between games to address it.
 
"As I told them, it ends now," he said.
 
He meant it.
 
Longwood (14-13, 4-8 Big South) regained its defensive edge, stymied High Point (13-12, 6-5 Big South) in crunch time, and rode late-game heroics from junior guard Shabooty Phillips to a gritty 62-59 road win against the Panthers Wednesday evening at the Millis Center.
 
The win snapped a four-game slump that was Longwood's longest since Aldrich took over the program and – following Longwood's 55-51 win in the first meeting between the teams this season on Jan. 24 – secured the program's first regular-season sweep over High Point since joining the Big South seven years ago.
 
"Our guys played really hard tonight. They really competed," said Aldrich, who moved Longwood to within three victories of tying the program's Division I-era wins record.
 
"High Point is a top-five team in the conference, and the reality is when our guys compete and battle, I think they can play with anybody in the league. I think they've proven that."
 
Trailing 49-42 with seven minutes to play, Longwood ended the game on a 20-10 run and held the Panthers without a field over the final 4:40.The Lancers did not commit a single turnover during that seven-minute span, ultimately overcoming an 11-point deficit that was the largest Longwood has overcome in a win this season.
 
At the center of that end-game run was Phillips, who scored Longwood's last 11 points, beginning with a three-pointer at 3:36 that cut High Point's lead to 55-54. He followed with a contested layup at 2:37 that gave Longwood its first lead of the half, 56-55, and then sank another jumper 30 seconds later to extend the lead to three.
 
After High Point reclaimed the lead on Jahaad Proctor's layup with 41 seconds remaining, Phillips knocked down four straight free throws in the final 35 seconds to put Longwood back on top and ice a win that was Longwood's third straight over the Panthers and second in a row at the Millis Center.
 
"Basketball's a game of runs," Aldrich said. "Especially when you play our style with the threes, it can get you back in pretty quickly. Sean hit those two big threes in the second half, and that was a big deal for us."
 
Phillips' heroics also included assists on three consecutive three-pointers just before his own scoring streak, hitting Sean Flood twice and Jaylon Wilson once during a 9-2 run that turned High Point's 49-42 lead into a tied game, 51-51.
 
Flood and Wilson combined for seven of Longwood's nine three-pointers on the night. Wilson scored 14 points and grabbed a career-high eight rebounds, while Flood chipped in nine points on three treys off the bench. JaShaun Smith also added 13 points on 6-of-10 shooting from the field, hitting every one of his six two-point attempts on the night.
 
"The guys did a great job of being resilient and coming back possession-by-possession," Aldrich said. "They had to play a lot of minutes. I think they were fatigued, and the reality was at the end of the day, they did what they needed to do to battle and fight. That was great to see."
 
The Panthers struggled from three-point range against Longwood, hitting just 4-of-19 (.211) shots from beyond the arc while shooting 19-of-45 (.422) from the field. Longwood forced High Point into 15 turnovers en route to holding them under 60 points for the second straight game.
 
Curtis Holland led High Point with 17 points, while Ricky Madison neared a double-double with 16 points and nine rebounds. Proctor, the Big South's No. 3 scorer at 19.3 points per game, scored just 10 points while shooting 4-of-10 against Longwood's defense.
 
"We've been talking about this to our guys, that every possession must matter," Aldrich said. "If every possession matters, that tells you that you're paying extremely hard and you have to be extremely focused. We certainly didn't do that perfectly tonight, and we really didn't even do it well through large swaths of the game. But it shows that if you grind it back and get back in and play with that mentality, you have the ability and talent to overcome big deficits."
 
Now back above .500, the Lancers enter their final four-game stretch run of the regular season beginning with this Saturday's rematch against Big South newcomer USC Upstate in Willett Hall at 3 p.m. Longwood is just three wins shy of matching the program's Division I record of 17 wins, set by the 2008-09 team, and the Big South record of five wins, set by the 2014-15 and 2015-16 Lancers.
 
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