Good pitching performances often have marked the Northwestern State baseball team’s most successful portions of the 2026 season. Saturday, Dylan Marionneaux threw a complete-game six-hitter for the Demons in a 2-1 win over Houston Christian.

The Demons were unable to find that type of success Sunday as HCU jumped to an early seven-run lead and had enough responses to hand Northwestern an 11-5 Southland Conference defeat at Brown-Stroud Field. The loss narrowed NSU’s lead in the conference standings with three weekend series remaining.

HCU opened the series Friday with a 5-2 victory when NSU could not deliver key hits to cut into the deficit.

“It’s a day where we are to be accountable for not playing well in any of the three phases of the game,” third-year head coach Chris Bertrand said. “When you give up 11 runs – and some of those runs in the manner we did – when you make three errors and more mistakes on top of that, we were not good enough today in any of the three phases to expect a different result.”

The Demons (23-13, 14-7) delivered constant pressure on six HCU pitchers but could not deliver a big hit that led to a crooked number.

On the other side, HCU (16-19, 8-10) created a pair of three-run innings to build a 7-0 lead through three and a half innings. The first big swing for the Huskies came from Levi Castelleja, whose three-run home run opened the scoring against Trent Hillen (2-2).

The Huskies chased Hillen after 3 1-3 innings, doing so with another three-run inning in the fourth.

Down 7-0, the Demons began to solve HCU right-hander Ben Smith (4-4), who worked four innings in relief of opener Trent Barnes.

JT Simonelli tripled and scored on Noah McNeil’s fourth-inning sacrifice fly before a two-out, fifth-inning rally produced an RBI triple by Joe Siervo and an RBI single from Thomas Marsala III.

The Huskies had an answer, however, in the sixth.

After a couple of Demon errors helped load the bases with no outs, Carter White nearly wiggled out of the jam, getting a pair of strikeouts before Katcher Halligan grounded a two-run single through the left side of the infield.

The same scenario played out across the eighth and ninth innings.

Northwestern took advantage of HCU’s lone error of the game to pull back within four runs in the eighth before Kyler Mentzel got a strikeout to strand the bases loaded before a two-run wild pitch in the top of the ninth allowed HCU to re-establish its six-run lead.

“They continue to fight, and they continue to battle,” Bertrand said. “It’s obvious we’re going through some things that we need find solutions for, and we need to find ways to overcome. No matter what, you have to be good in all three phases of the game, and today, the Demons were 0-for-3.”

The Demons return to action Tuesday when they open a four-game road trip at LSU. First pitch is set for 6:30 p.m. at Alex Box Stadium.