After a season-opening, three-game sweep of former Southland Conference rival UT Arlington, the Northwestern State baseball team is home tonight against another former Southland foe – ULM.
The 6 p.m. game at Brown-Stroud Field will air on ESPN+. After winning in different ways over the weekend, third-year coach Chris Bertrand is hoping to see continued progress against the Warhawks.
“We learned how to push buttons in order to be able to try to generate what we felt we needed at the time,” said Bertrand, whose team produced Northwestern’s first season-opening sweep since 2016. “You saw us make an attempt later in the weekend to do some things to get off to a better start. We tried as the weekend went to continue to try to push the buttons of where we needed to make adjustments and how we needed to make those adjustments. You saw the fruits of that labor or the fruit of that through process show in how we played our most complete game on Sunday.”
The Demons (3-0) now come face to face with a program that is among Northwestern’s most common non-conference opponents. With the exception of the COVID-shortened 2020 season, the Demons and Warhawks have met every season since at least 1990.
Most of those seasons have included multiple matchups. A season ago, the Warhawks (2-2) took two of three games in the season series.
This time, ULM returns to Natchitoches with a first-year coach who is no stranger to the Southland Conference or Northwestern.
Ford Pemberton took over the reins of the Warhawk program directly from Memphis, but Pemberton’s previous coaching stops included a total of seven seasons on the staffs of Nicholls and Southeastern Louisiana.
“They have great athletes, and they’re going to roll out a lineup a good lineup and pitching staff and a team that has really nice talent and really nice physicality,” Bertrand said. “We’re going to have to be at our best, not only mentally in our preparation for them, but also we’re going to have to be at our best in continuing the momentum that was built (Sunday). We want to continue with the brand of baseball – if we feel like Sunday was our most complementary and complete day.”
The Demons executed offensively and on the mound at a high level against UTA to sweep the Mavericks. In three games, Northwestern slugged six home runs and added three stolen bases.
On the mound, the Demons limited UTA to a .200 team batting average while pitching to a 1.69 ERA. Ten Demon pitchers combined to strike out 40 Maverick hitters while issuing just seven walks.
That included 12 scoreless innings in a 14-inning, season-opening win on Friday. The Warhawks, however, present a different challenge after opening the Pemberton era by splitting four games with Central Arkansas.
“As the weekend went on, we settled in and we were able to make the necessary adjustments to get significantly closer to complementary and complete baseball,” Bertrand said. “(ULM) is going to run a little bit more than some of the other teams in that conference or some ULM teams have run before. They’re going to try to do some barrel control and some things that we have to be ready for and be sure we’re holding our jobs and holding our assignments well. We’re going to have to play really heads-up baseball.”
SOFTBALL IN RUSTON: Building off progress shown in the second weekend of the season at the Mardi Gras Mambo, the Lady Demons (3-8, but 3-3 last week) go to Louisiana Tech (8-2) tonight in the first of two meetings with the Bulldogs this year.
First pitch is 6 p.m. with game coverage on ESPN+.
Also a participant in this past weekend’s tournament in Youngsville, Tech picked up three wins in their five games. Reagan Marchant, the preseason CUSA Player of the Year and newly named CUSA Player of the Week, clubbed a walk-off home run to give the Bulldogs their win against New Mexico.
Marchant enters the matchup hitting .353 and is second on the team with 10 RBI. She went 8-for-20 at the plate in six games this past week with nine RBI.
The Demons got their own heroics from sophomore Brynn Daniel who delivered her first walk-off hit, a single to right to beat Georgia State 9-8, giving NSU its second seven-run comeback win in as many years.
Daniel secured her spot as the team’s Queen of the Krewe of Raking after going 8-for-15 (.533) at the plate at the Mardi Gras Mambo, and reached base 10 times in her final 13 plate appearances.
She leads the team with a .414 batting average and tops the club in hits, slugging, OPS and on-base percentage. Her seven walks are also the most on the team this year and three stolen bases is second.
