NATCHITOCHES – There will be plenty of eggs found and chocolate bunny ears eaten this weekend across the area. One thing that may be at a premium, however, are runs as Northwestern State and McNeese, two of the top pitching staffs in the conference, square off in a three-game series.
 
Moved up one day due to the Easter holiday, the series begins on Thursday night at 6 p.m. at Lady Demon Diamond and ends with a Good Friday doubleheader starting at 1 p.m. All games will be streamed live at www.nsudemons.com/watch with live links also available on the NSU Athletics mobile app, a free download in either the Apple or Google stores.
 
The Lady Demons (24-15, 6-3) have had the best pitching staff in the conference the entire season. With a 2.40 team ERA, 93 earned runs allowed in more than 270 innings, more than 300 strikeouts and an opponent's batting average at .212, NSU leads the league in every major category.
 
Freshman Sage Hoover has been on a tear of late with three wins in her previous four starts, all complete games, with perhaps her most impressive outings coming this past weekend in a 12-inning, 18-strikeout win at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.
 
"Couldn't be prouder of her for some things she went through during that game," head coach Donald Pickett said. "Her working with Coach (Lexi) Smith and continuing to adjust things, grind it out and be mature enough to handle those things during that type of a game with it being so close. It was a huge deal what she did to help us win that game."
 
Hoover (9-4) was named SLC Pitcher of the Week following her performance and bumped her league-leading strikeout total to 142 on the season with an equally as impressive 10.4 K/7 rate, 33^rd best in the nation.
 
She will likely get the nod in Thursday's opener against McNeese's Shaelyn Sanders (6-1), who with Hoover have alternated weekly pitching honors from the conference in each of the past four weeks.
 
NSU and McNeese (24-15, 8-1) have accounted for eight of the nine total weekly pitching awards this season. Hoover (2), Maggie Darr (1) and Bronte Rhoden (1) have each earned the award for the Lady Demons while Sanders (2) and Ashley Vallejo (2), the likely game two starter, have split the four for the Cowgirls.
 
"You're going to have to earn your runs this weekend, nothing is going to be given to you," Pickett said. "Whichever team gives away runs in this series is really putting the other in a good situation to win. 
 
"I think we've got a chance to come out and put some runs on the board if we take what we've been doing and be confident in the box. Hopefully we'll continue to get good pitching from our staff, and we make plays behind them. I think if we make those plays and we have smart at bats, that's the recipe for success this weekend."
 
In the series in Corpus Christi the Lady Demons missed chances with runners on base that would have changed the entire dynamic of the game on multiple occasions. Against a McNeese team that is just as stingy in terms of runs allowed as NSU, Pickett is hopeful his team learns quickly from the frustrations of the weekend past.
 
"We just didn't seem as focused as we've been and weren't able to adjust," he said. "We kept doing some things we haven't done this year. It was frustrating for everybody but if we don't do anything else from that series, we have to learn from it.
 
"We're playing a great team this weekend and we're going to have to play our best games. We're going to have to have our minds right and the right approaches going into it and continue to pull together as a team and make this happen."