Longwood men’s head soccer coach Jon Atkinson won’t go as far as to say that the program has finally arrived.
But the Lancers have certainly knocked on the door and guests are aware of their presence under Atkinson, a native of Newcastle, England who just completed his 11th year with the program and his ninth as the head coach.
After winning the Atlantic Soccer Conference title in 2011, Atkinson led the move to the Big South Conference in 2013
“It was as if the work started again in earnest,” he says of joining the Division I circuit.
The Lancers were 3-12-3 overall and 2-7-1 in the Big South in 2012, but LU turned heads this past season by going 6-3-1 in conference play and 7-9-4 overall as Atkinson was named the Big South Coach of the Year.
“The highlight was seeing our guys get results against peer institutions,” Atkinson notes.
Longwood advanced to the Big South Tournament semifinals, before falling 2-0 to Liberty in November. Liberty lost in the tournament title game to Coastal Carolina, who was ranked No. 21 in the nation when Longwood lost at home to them on Senior Day in the regular-season finale Nov. 9.
The Lancers’ program is in good hands under a coach who grew up in a country where the sport is a national obsession.
Atkinson earned his Bachelor of Science degree in sports management from Wearside College in Sunderland, England and his Bachelor of Arts degree in business administration from Sunderland University.
He played at the pro level in England with Sunderland and Darlington FC, but began to focus on coaching as a career path when he suffered a leg injury in the late 1990s.
Through a fellow Brit, Atkinson heard about a chance to join the program at West Virginia Wesleyan College as a player-coach.
He was there from 1999 to 2002 and helped WVWC capture a pair of West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WVIAC) titles and a second-place finish in three years.
Another major event came in West Virginia when he met Nikki Hall (Longwood class of 1998), a former basketball All-American and Academic All-American for the Lancers. She was the head women’s hoop coach at West Virginia Wesleyan,.
They were later married and the family, which now includes three young children, made the move to Farmville, as Hall became an assistant women’s basketball coach at Longwood and Atkinson eventually joined the men’s soccer program as an assistant coach.
Atkinson and his staff have sent players to the next level, as goalie Josh Helmick of Springfield was drafted by Colorado in the fourth round of the Major League Soccer (MLS) draft in 2012.
“To have Joel get drafted by a MLS team, it says a lot about the direction of the program and the growth over the years,” Atkinson said at the time. And the same could be said of the head coach, who is gradually building a Big South contender in Farmville.
“The 10 years have flown by,” he says.
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