BATON ROUGE – A familiar place filled with unfamiliar opponents awaits the Northwestern State baseball team when it hits the road for the first time in the 2024 season.
 
The Demons (0-3) head to LSU's Alex Box Stadium for the fourth straight season, but on this occasion they will not face the defending national champions. Instead, Northwestern State will play two games apiece against Northern Illinois (1-3) and Stony Brook (1-3), beginning with Thursday's 6 p.m. matchup with Northern Illinois.
 
In addition to playing four games across three days, the Demons will do so with one day less rest than normal because of the Thursday, Friday, Saturday schedule.
 
The rest of the weekend's schedule includes games against Stony Brook at 10 a.m. Friday and 6 p.m. Saturday and a second matchup with Northern Illinois at 6 p.m. Friday.
 
Free streaming audio of the first three games of the weekend on www.NSUDemons.com and through the Northwestern State Athletics mobile app, which can be downloaded free for Apple and Android devices. Saturday's game will air on KLSU, the student radio station at LSU. Admission to all four games is free of charge.
 
"The biggest thing, obviously to everybody, is the way you manage the pitching staff," first-year head coach Chris Bertrand said. "You have to play close attention to the amount of rest, play close attention to workload. We have to pay close attention to the way we're going to manage the staff over the course of four games while taking a day of rest out of the equation. From a planning and organizational standpoint, we're going to put a lot of thought and emphasis into it and be sure it is done in a way that fits the ball club the best way we can."
 
Northwestern State jumps back into action after an opening weekend in which the Demons dropped all three games to Southern Illinois but came away with a sense of balance – one that will be on display during the four games against Northern Illinois and Stony Brook.
 
The Demons averaged nine runs per game and opened the season batting .324 against the Salukis – one of the positives Bertrand and his team could take away from the opening weekend series.
 
"We're excited about the things we can pull from it," he said. "For us, the challenge that remains is balance. We want to pull from the wonderful things we did. We want to continue to sharpen those things, to broaden the scope of those things. We have to take the things we did poorly and go to work fixing those things and using a better, a cleaner brand of baseball in the games we play."
 
The Demons also have to balance scouting a pair of teams for two games each instead of one team for three games as is the case in the majority of college baseball weekend series.
 
Both Northern Illinois and Stony Brook dropped three of four games in their opening-weekend series against Abilene Christian and Purdue, respectively. They did so in similar fashion with each team's lone win coming via a double-digit scoring performance.
 
All told, it adds up to a weekend where the Demons will aim to strike the balance of performance and preparation for the rest of the season.
 
"You're going to fall into the same preparation for a double midweek when you play two different teams back to back," Bertrand said. "You're faced with the same thing in the conference tournament. You may have to play a doubleheader or play four games in three days. It's a chance to prepare for a multitude of opportunities. When we build our program to where we play deeper in the postseason, that's what a regional looks like.
 
"What can we learn and take with us into the future? We are never going to stop learning, competing or trying to get better, and we have a team that embraces that. Even though things didn't go our way the first three times we had a chance to do that, that doesn't matter to them. What I want us worried about is how to keep stacking bricks and using lessons to create championship habits. We have a team that wants to do that, and I believe we have what is necessary to have a good baseball team."
 
Probable Starters:
Thursday: Northern Illinois RHP Adam Brouwer (0-1, 12.27) vs. Northwestern State RHP Dawson Flowers (0-0, 0.00)
Friday: Stony Brook RHP Ty Saunders (0-0, 4.76) vs. Northwestern State RHP Chase Prestwich (0-1, 27.00)
Friday: Northwestern State RHP Bryce Leonard (0-0, 9.00) vs. Northern Illinois RHP Ty Brachbill (0-1, 13.50)
Saturday: Northwestern State RHP Dylan Marionneaux (0-0, 0.00) vs. Stony Brook LHP Nicholas Rizzo (0-1, 12.71)