HAMMOND – By the time the Northwestern State women's basketball team played its 16^th game of the season, the Lady Demons already had used seven starting lineups.
 
As game No. 19 arrives at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at Southeastern Louisiana, lineup No. 7 featuring Beatrice Attura, Nia Randall, Shahd Abboud, Tia Youngblood and Cheyenne Brown has settled in, starting Northwestern State's three previous games.
 
The Lady Demons (9-9, 3-4 Southland Conference) have won three of those four games.
 
The three games marked the first three starts of Randall's freshman season and saw Youngblood re-enter the starting lineup after a 10-game absence.
 
"(Randall) brings energy," first-year head coach Jordan Dupuy said. "With that comes some freshman mistakes, but you can live with it because her effort is good. As she continues to play, her understanding of the game plan, her understanding of the system is getting better as well."
 
The same can be said for Youngblood, who collected 11 rebounds against McNeese on Saturday, hitting that number for the second time in the past four games.
 
"What Tia understands is there are times she needs to score it," Dupuy said. "She's not going to take a bad shot. She's going to be physical on the defensive end. I alluded to this after our last game against McNeese, and this signifies how she played that entire game. She had one possession where she hard hedged three times and pushed their point guard almost to half-court, switched onto another guard, contained her dribble penetration and got the defensive rebound, all within a 30-second period.
 
"If we can all embrace that kind of effort and defensive execution for 40 minutes, we'd be difficult to beat."
 
That energy and effort helped the Lady Demons turn around a slow start in Southland Conference play. Included in a four-game stretch that saw Northwestern State drop three games was a loss at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi that could have ramifications in Hammond.
 
Northwestern State's 60-51 loss in Corpus Christi came against a previously winless team in conference play. Southeastern Louisiana (3-15, 1-6) already has won its first conference game, but the Lions' record is not indicative of the team Dupuy said his team will see.
 
"The thing you have to give (SLU coach) Errol (Gauff) credit for is how hard they play, especially at home," Dupuy said. "To me, it's almost two different teams with their level of urgency, their level of intensity when they play at home. I've said it all the time, you throw records out the window when it comes to conference games. It's about matchups. It's about toughness. It's about will. They have all three of those when they play at home."
 
At home or on the road, the Lions bring one of the Southland Conference's top scorers in junior Taylin Underwood, whose 17.6 points per game average ranks her fourth in the league. Underwood adds a team-leading 3.2 assists per game as well.
 
Northwestern State will counter with senior guard Beatrice Attura, whose 19.1 points per game average is second in the league and whose 4.7 assists per game rank third in the conference.
 
"Underwood can create her own offense," Dupuy said. "She's really good at using ball screens. What Taylin does is make everyone else better, but she'll get it in the full-court and push it and create offense as well. The biggest thing is for us to handle their pressure and to score on the offensive end.
 
"When we're good, we get stops, we get out and run, and our half-court execution becomes better."
 
Wednesday's game can be heard on the Demon Sports Network, which includes 100.7 FM KZBL in Natchitoches and 92.1 FM KSYR in Shreveport. Free streaming audio is available at www.NSUDemons.com. Tony Taglavore, in his ninth year, will handle the play-by-play call of the game.