FARMVILLE, Va. – Longwood baseball finished off a sweep of High Point on Sunday afternoon with a 13-5 win. The Lancer (12-19, 4-5 Big South) bullpen put together one of its finest performances of the season, and the offense scored runs in six innings to power Longwood to its first conference sweep of the season.
 
SCORE:
 
               R             H            E
HPU       5             8             3
LWU      13           14           2
 
Top Longwood Performers:
Eliot Dix: 3-5, 3R, 2B, HR; Luis DeLeon: 2-3, R, RBI, 3B, SB; Drew Camp: 2-3, R, RBI, 2B
 
HOW IT HAPPENED:
 
Normally, Sunday's have been Andrew Potojecki's domain. He dominates, and the team follows suit. This time, however, it was the team that picked up their ace. The bullpen tossed eight innings of one-run ball, and the offense pounded out 14 hits that paved the way to 13 runs.
 
High Point (7-20, 1-8 Big South) jumped out to an early 4-0 lead through the team's first two at bats, but Longwood refused to back down. Andrew Melnyk came on in relief of Potojecki and limited the damage in the second inning to help settle things. Aidan Vanvickle took over for him in the fourth, and the rest of the bullpen never wavered.
 
While the relief corps did its job, the Lancer offense got to work. The Lancers cut the lead to two in the second, and Luis DeLeon's RBI triple trimmed it to one in the third.
 
In the fourth, Drew Camp scampered home on a wild pitch, and Gregory Ryan, Jr. put Longwood up for good in the fifth. The redshirt-senior demolished a two-run home run for a 6-4 lead on his birthday, and Longwood never looked back.
 
Eliot Dix added a home run, his third base hit of the day, in the eighth inning as the Lancers put the game out of reach.
 
Vanvickle (2-0) earned the win for the Lancers after tossing a pair of scoreless frames for Longwood, including the fifth. The righty struck out one and gave up one hit. Dominick D'Ercole came on in the seventh, with Longwood up 6-5, and he closed out the game to earn the three-inning save. He worked around three hits.
 
Everett Vaughn (1-1) took the loss for High Point. He gave up six runs, five earned, on seven hits with three walks and five strikeouts.
 
WHAT THEY SAID:
 
"I'm proud of the way we competed all weekend," said Longwood Head Coach Chad Oxendine. "It's pretty easy if you win the first two to come and kind of go through the motions on that third day. Poto didn't have his best stuff today, but the guys just kept fighting and fighting and clawing, and we were fortunate enough to get out of here with a sweep today."
 
"It's huge," Oxendine said about his bullpen's performance in a tight spot. "We gave up one run over the last seven innings to a team like High Point that has tremendous juice. They get a lot of extra base hits, and they were on Poto early. But it is so big for the whole pitching staff to know that they're a unit. They've got each other's back, and they're going to pick each other up. It was great to see today."
 
"I knew he was going hit one. Greg is that type of player," Oxendine said of the birthday boy with the go-ahead homer. "He got a fastball he could drive and put a really good swing on it."
 
"We looked at it, and we had, I think, 27 two-strike counts," Oxendine added about the key to the offensive production. "If I'm not mistaken, 20 of those, we either put a ball in play or we walked. We eliminated strikeouts—we only had seven on the day—and we were able to move the ball. We got some big hits. You think about the one at bat Luis had, I don't know how many balls he fouled off [13-pitch at bat in total], then hit a big triple to score Eliot Dix in that inning. That was our approach today. We're not going to throw away any at bats, and we're going to grind out AB's. The guys did a heck of a job of that."
 
ADDITIONAL NOTES:
 
Longwood has won five of its past six.
 
The Lancers have posted at least 10 hits in four of their past six games, all wins.
 
Longwood scored at least 10 runs for the second straight game and fourth time in the team's base six.
 
Ryan hit his team-best ninth home run of the season. It was his third home run in the past eight days.
 
DeLeon had his fourth multi-hit game in his past five games for Longwood.
 
Hayden Harris has hit safely in five straight games.
 
Drew Camp has an RBI in six straight games for Longwood. He has 9 RBI in that stretch.
 
UP NEXT:
 
Longwood hits the road and heads out to Norfolk State on Tuesday. First pitch is set for 3 p.m.
 
#GoWood #HorsePower