NATCHITOCHES – The cleaner, complementary brand on baseball first-year head coach Chris Bertrand was looking for showed up Friday night at Brown-Stroud Field.
 
Pitching? Junior right-hander Chase Prestwich took care of most of that. The offense? Rocco Gump had the biggest swing of the night. Defense? Samuel Stephenson and company had a pair of late-game moments.
 
It all added up to the first home win of the Bertrand era, a 5-3 victory against preseason Sun Belt Conference favorite Troy, snapping the Trojans' seven-game win streak.
 
"We get to feel the joy we do because we won the game, but more than that, I'm proud of the men that comprise this team," Bertrand said. "Tonight, you saw what we're capable of doing, but more importantly, you saw people continue to answer the challenge of cleaning up the brand of baseball. You saw what we're capable of when we do that."
 
As is often the case, success started on the mound with Prestwich (2-1) delivering arguably the best start of his career.
 
Making his third start as part of the weekend rotation, Prestwich struck out a career-high 10 batters while scattering five hits in 6 2-3 innings of two-run ball. That line came against a Troy offense that came into the weekend averaging 11 runs per game and batting .353 as a team.
 
Three batters into the game, the Trojans (9-2) held a 1-0 lead on back-to-back doubles by Ethan Kavanagh and Will Butcher. Those hits did not deter Prestwich, who retired eight straight Trojans from the second through the fifth innings and 10 of 11 in one stretch.
 
"Sometimes good hitters are going to be good hitters," said Prestwich, who turned in NSU's first 10-strikeout game by a pitcher since Alex Makarewich fanned 12 Alabama A&M hitters on March 11, 2023.
 
"They're a really good team. They're going to do stuff like that. I just continued to stick to what I was doing, and it worked out."
 
Armed with a sharp slider, Prestwich silenced the red-hot Troy lineup and allowed the Demons (3-7) to turn the game around on a two-pitch sequence in the third inning.
 
Stephenson led off the frame with a line-drive double to left off preseason Sun Belt Pitcher of the Year Grayson Stewart (0-1) but was in danger of being stranded after Stewart retired the next two Demons.
 
Reese Lipoma turned on the first pitch he saw from Stewart and drilled it for a game-tying double to left before Gump followed with a towering two-run home run to right field on a first-pitch fastball to put the Demons ahead to stay.
 
"We went out there with a plan to hit fastballs early in the count and react to anything else," said Gump, who took over the team lead with his third home run of the season. "They do a good job of mixing pitches, so I went out there and got my swing off on a pitch over the plate."
 
While Prestwich used a pair of strikeouts to extricate himself from trouble after Mikey Bello's one-out double in the fifth, he used the middle-infield defense of Stephenson and Hill to erase leadoff base runners in the sixth and seventh innings to keep the Demons in front.
 
Stephenson twice started 4-6-3 double plays with his seventh-inning stop stunning even Prestwich as Stephenson glided to his right to start a twin killing off the bat of Shane Lewis.
 
"On one of the double plays, I thought it was a base hit," Prestwich said. "I turn around and Sam Stephenson's there glove flipping it. I was like, 'Wow.' When you have a good defense behind you, there's a lot of trust and it helps you settle in. You feel like no matter where they hit it, someone's going to make a play."
 
Stephenson had the Demons' only multi-hit game, going 2-for-3, while Gump and Lipoma each drove in two runs. Lipoma's second RBI scored Cole Hill, who led off the fifth inning with a single and advanced to third on a pair of wild pitches before scoring on Lipoma's grounder to second base.
 
That gave Lipoma his first career multi-RBI game.
 
"We've been saying it for seven or eight months, whatever it takes," Bertrand said. "Whatever it takes on any given night. Win in multitudes of ways and learn lessons. It feels good to get one, but I can't tell you what something like that from an execution standpoint does for our team. We can grab those nuggets, keep punching and keep pounding away.'
 
The series continues Saturday at 6:30 p.m. Troy will send left-hander Logan Ross (2-0, 3.00) to the mound against NSU right-hander Dawson Flowers (0-0, 4.91).
 
Northwestern State 5, Troy 3
Troy      100 000 101 — 3 9 1
NSU     003 010 01x — 5 7 1
W – Chase Prestwich (2-1). L – Grayson Stewart (0-1). S – Tyler Bryan (1). 2B – Troy, Ethan Kavanagh, Will Butcher, Mikey Bello. NSU, Reese Lipoma, Samuel Stephenson. 3B – NSU, Clay Jung. HR – NSU, Rocco Gump (3). Highlights: Troy, Kole Myers 2-5, 2 RBIs; Mikey Bello 2-4, 2B. NSU, Stephenson 2-3, 2B.
Records: Troy 9-2; Northwestern State 3-7.