With the Longwood men’s and women’s basketball teams seemingly going in different directions, eighth-year Director of Athletics Troy Austin spoke out last week on both teams’ respective recent trends.
The women are currently first in the Big South at 9-9 (6-1 Big South) ahead of tomorrow’s game at High Point, and the men are at 3-16 overall (0-5 Big South) and on a nine-game losing streak.
“I think both teams came out and played their best basketball up to this point of the year. Unfortunately, we’ve had different results in that, but I do think they’ve both played well,” Austin said. “The men have played hard against what will work out to be the top third of the conference, as have the women.
“I’ve been cautiously optimistic because it’s always such a long season. You try not to get too excited or too down and assess it as evenly as possible,” Austin added.
The women played nine games between finals and the start of the semester, going 6-3. Wins over Gardner-Webb, Winthrop and Charleston Southern, among others, have led them to where they stand now. Two of those losses were to Pac-12 teams Arizona and Arizona State. Austin said,“To be honest, I didn’t really guess where they would be [in the standings]. My thought was always, ‘I want us to come out and play hard.’ I knew that we wouldn’t completely be ready for the pace of conference play knowing that each team was going to give us their best shot, as we’ll give each team our best shot ... I’m proud of the women more than anything really, that they’ve closed out games."
The men also had nine games on top, including the start of their slate. They won just one game, and went winless against Division I opponents. An 86-74 win over Southern Virginia on Dec. 13 remains the team’s only win since they defeated Central Penn College on Nov. 28. inaugural Big South
Some of their opponents included No. 21 Georgetown (89-53), Virginia Commonwealth (93-56) and Canisius (82-54). When asked about his management style when it comes to coaches, Austin responded, “I try to be hands-off; I don’t know if it results in that... I don’t get involved with a lot of day-to-day activities. I assist in recruiting when asked, but really I take my role as an instructor and foster their success when possible.”
Regarding program evaluation, Austin said that he “doesn’t anticipate any trend continuing and that’s why I’m cautiously optimistic with the good starts and confident about slow starts and us being able to reverse bad trends ... as I do with each program, I look at what their expectations were at the start of the season and what goals were set and how close they came to meeting those or exceeding those. I make a judgment based on that.”
