FARMVILLE, Va. – Throughout February, Longwood head coach Griff Aldrich has made frequent use of the adjectives "grueling" and "exhausting" to describe a stretch that has seen Longwood grind through five games crammed into a 10-day span.
 
Shortly after his Lancers (11-17, 6-9 Big South) bookended that gauntlet with a milestone 76-68 win over Commonwealth rival Hampton Saturday night in Willett Hall, he was quick to slap another label on it.
 
"We told the guys before the game, it's the fifth game in a 10-day stretch for both teams, which is murder."
 
But the short-rested Lancers proved their head coach hyperbolic for the first time all season by not only surviving that 10-day challenge but nearly acing it, coming out of it with three victories and their program-record sixth Big South win of the season.
 
Going toe-to-toe with a Hampton (11-15, 6-7 Big South) team led by the nation's No. 3 scorer in senior guard Jermaine Marrow, Longwood punched and counter-punched its way to a milestone win that extended a streak of five victories in the past eight games, was its first against Hampton in the Big South era, and broke the 2014-15 and 2018-19 Lancers' benchmarks for most Big South wins since joining the league eight years ago.
 
"This was just a toughness game," Aldrich said. "This was going to be a question of who wanted it more, and I think it was very clear the Lancers did. I thought we were the aggressor for the vast majority of the game, and I thought our guys really competed. Where that shows up is on the defensive end. Holding a team that has basically two all-conference first-team players to 36 percent shooting is remarkable."
 
Longwood junior Jordan Cintron logged his fourth career double-double and provided spark after spark with a bevy of hustle plays, and senior guard Shabooty Phillips played the role of veteran floor general en route to knocking off the Big South's preseason No. 4 selection. Cintron stuffed the stat sheet with 10 points, 11 rebounds, two steals and an assist, while Phillips committed just one turnover and contributed 10 points and three assists in his team-high 31 minutes
 
Cintron controlled the boards throughout Saturday's Commonwealth clash to help the Lancers match a physical Hampton team with 20 points in the paint. He and Phillips were two of Longwood's four double-digit scorers, leading a quartet that also included Juan Munoz with 16 points and DeShaun Wade with 11.
 
"There was a consistency of effort," Aldrich said. "They punched, we punched, they punched, we punched, and then finally I think they ran out of gas. They had four guys who played 35-40 minutes, and that's hard to do, and I'm sure they've been doing that for the past five games. I just thought we had a deeper bench, and I thought we were consistently tougher."
 
Behind that depth, Longwood put Hampton on the ropes at the 11-minute mark with three consecutive three-pointers by JaShaun Smith, Wade and Jaylon Wilson and never let up. That 9-0 run broke a 48-48 tie and ballooned to a 20-7 rally that kept Longwood in front by double digits until Marrow sank a layup at the buzzer to cut the final margin to eight points.
 
Marrow and frontcourt mate Ben Stanley both finished with 21 points as Hampton's only two double-figure scorers. Longwood's defense locked down the Pirates in the game's final six minutes, holding them to just one field goal during a nearly five-minute span until Marrow took over with three consecutive makes in the final 1:06.
 
"Marrow gets a lot of fouls, and he gets into people, but that didn't hinder our guards' aggressiveness with him," said Cintron. "They didn't back off and let him get comfortable. Whatever he got, he had to earn. Our guys weren't going to back down, and they were the aggressors. They made things tough for him, and even though he got to the free throw line, he didn't get comfortable."
 
Cintron was aggressive in his own right, particularly in the paint where he grabbed three offensive rebounds to help Longwood amass 11 second-chance points for the second straight game. Two of those boards came on one possession in the final five minutes when he grabbed back-to-back missed jumpers by Christian Wilson and turned the second of those into a made jumper of his own. That basket pushed Longwood's lead to 68-55, which at the time was the Lancers' largest lead of the night.
 
"I don't ever think the win is in hand, but it was definitely a sequence that pushed us in a winning direction," he said. "It was something where I know I just need to help the team in any way I can. Getting those rebounds, for us it really sent a message to Hampton that we wanted it and we were going to do whatever we had to do to take it."
 
With just three conference games remaining, Longwood is less than two wins out of a top five spot in the Big South standings. The Lancers' final climb up that ladder begins this Thursday, Feb. 20, with a trip to USC Upstate and concludes with the home finale against High Point on Feb. 22 and the regular-season finale at Presbyterian on Feb. 27.
 
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