NATCHITOCHES – The changing face of the Southland Conference left the Northwestern State baseball team with a much different look to its 2022 season.
 
One of the unexpected benefits of the July 1, 2021, departures of five teams was the addition of possible non-conference opponents for the Demons.
 
That scenario will play out Tuesday night at 6 p.m. when former SLC member Lamar (11-5) visits Brown-Stroud Field for a mid-week matchup with Northwestern State (6-9). Free streaming audio and subscription video is available on www.NSUDemons.com and through the Northwestern State Athletics mobile app, which can be downloaded free for Apple and Android devices.
 
"Being a couple of hours away from Lamar and some of the other teams who have left the league gives you some like opponents to play in mid-week games or schedule for some weekends like we did with SFA," sixth-year head coach Bobby Barbier said. "In the future, it will help us with the non-conference schedule. We hate to see them leave, but it will help us in that aspect."
 
Both teams enter the matchup off weekend sweeps.
 
Lamar took all three games from Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches, Texas, in its first Western Athletic Conference series, making the Cardinals 7-1 in their past eight games. Offense has driven the run of success as Lamar has averaged 8.8 runs per game in that stretch, topping double figures three times.
 
"They have a really good team," Barbier said. "We watched them a lot (Monday) morning. The guy on the mound will be good. They're pitching it well as a staff. They've got some guys in the lineup who have been there a few years. I think one of them has been there since we've been here."
 
While the Cardinals have put together an eight-game run of offensive success, Northwestern State enters the mid-week matchup of the most runs it has scored in a three-game period in four seasons.
 
The Demons rang up 55 runs in a three-game sweep of Alcorn, marking the most runs by an NSU team since scoring 59 against Mississippi Valley State and Houston Baptist from April 24-27, 2018.
 
"It's good to get back on the right side of things," Barbier said. "We can talk about good at-bats and quality at-bats, but it's good for the guys to see that hit column go up and the averages move in the right direction. We did a lot of good things on the mound, defensively and having patient at-bats. We really worked on fouling off some pitches with two strikes and having a better two-strike approach than we've had in the early part of the season. We really improved in those aspects. They really responded to what we asked them to do."