Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Pressure creates diamonds, the saying goes. But sometimes, pressure breaks stuff, in a good way! Case in point? The Longwood women’s basketball team. The Lancers have used a swarming, fast, aggressive, relentless pressure to hound opponents all season, and the results speak for themselves.

The team has won eight out of nine. A 5-1 start to Big South play. Oh, and a team that leads not just the Big South but the nation in steals per game. The Lancers have also forced more turnovers than anyone in the nation.

“That’s the name of the game for us,” said Longwood Head Coach Erika Lang-Montgomery about her team’s identity starting on the defensive end of the floor. “We want to stay aggressive for 40 minutes.”

The Lancers average 15.1 steals per game. During Saturday’s last second loss to USC Upstate, the team recorded 18. To play offense against Longwood is to dance on a knife’s edge, if that knife had a hunger for the ball that was in your hands at all times.

The point of the spear

Point guard Kiki McIntyre serves as the point of the spear, or perhaps, more accurately, the lead wolf in the pack. Against Presbyterian in the conference opener, she tied the Big South record with a whopping 10 steals.

“I just apply ball pressure,” McIntyre said after the game against Presbyterian. “Once you get enough steals, people are scared and will cough it up. I poke at it, and it’s a lot of ball pressure.”

“She has a knack for that,” Lang-Montgomery said about McIntyre’s prowess in dispossessing opponents. “That’s the thing. She’s our floor general…and what she brings to us each day is huge on both sides of the ball.

The graduate student is a one-woman source of havoc certainly, averaging nearly four steals per game, but the Lancers hunt as a pack.

Mariah Wilson (60 steals) is second in the Big South in steals, and Malea Brown has added 54 steals as well. Five players are averaging more than one steal per game.

“It’s our bread and butter,” Wilson said about the team’s pressure defense. “That’s what we focus on at practice. We’ve trained up to this point. So to see the fruits of our labor work, it feels so good.”

One mistake, one errant pass, one lapse of concentration, and someone in Lancer blue or white is there for the briefest of seconds before going the other way.

“I think it says a lot about who we are as a team,” Lang-Montgomery said about how the team has depth and is connected, a necessity when pressing. “It doesn’t matter what night or whose night it is.”

Longwood women’s basketball team keeps in focus

“We just talk to each other,” Wilson said about keeping the team’s identity in focus. “A lot of times, if you ever see us in our huddle, we are saying, ‘We’ve got to get the next one. We got that. We got this one.’ We just keep talking to each other on the floor.”

That relentless pressure has carried through into conference play. The team forced 26 turnovers per game in non-conference play and matched it in Big South action.

The Longwood women’s basketball team has forced at least 20 turnovers in all but three games, and they have forced opponents to cough the ball up at least 30 times six times.

Bulldogs come to JPB this week

Longwood hosts Gardner-Webb on Wednesday, Jan. 29. Tip is set for 7 p.m. at the Joan Perry Brock Center, and the game will air on ESPN+. Coming off their first loss in several weeks, Lang-Montgomery said there’s no time to rest, as the team moves through conference play. 

“It feels pretty darn good,” said Lang-Montgomery of her team’s start to conference play. “We are excited to be in first place by ourselves right now, but we can’t rest. We know there is a lot of work to be done.”