BATON ROUGE – When the Northwestern State baseball team heads south for its final scheduled midweek game of the 2024 season, it will do so in a place that its newcomer-laden roster already knows well.
 
The Demons square off with state rival LSU at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday night in Alex Box Stadium, a place in which the Demons already own a 2-2 mark this season. The game will air on SECNetwork Plus with free streaming audio available through www.NSUDemons.com and the Northwestern State Athletics mobile app, which can be downloaded free for Apple and Android devices.
 
While the Demons (19-27) familiarized themselves with the physical nature of Alex Box Stadium in February, there is one key difference that arrives Tuesday – an LSU team that took two of three from then-No. 1 Texas A&M this past weekend to improve to 31-18 on the season.
 
When Northwestern State made its first trip to Baton Rouge this season, the Demons faced Northern Illinois and Stony Brook twice each.
 
"When we talk about our club and we use the word learning, I hope the guys understand this is one of the reasons we did it," said first-year head coach Chris Bertrand, whose first win as NSU's skipper came Feb. 22 against Northern Illinois at Alex Box. "We'll take what we can learn from those games at Alex Box – what does the visual look like, how does the infield play. It's one of the few games we play on an all-natural surface. What does a fly ball look like in a stadium that size? All of those things. That's why we did it. That's in line with the message to the team and the message of how we're trying to build our program."
 
The Demons' four-game split in February gave NSU its first wins of the season and a mix of positives in all three phases of the game.
 
NSU won a game in which it scored in double digits (13-6 against Northern Illinois) and one where it executed on the mound and in small-ball situations (5-2 vs. Stony Brook).
 
The Demons' next challenge in the capital city of Louisiana comes against the defending national champions and NSU's lone Southeastern Conference opponent of the season, one that will have a much larger and engaged crowd than Northwestern State saw in Week 2 of the season.
 
"The difference will be the opponent and a more electric or a louder environment, whichever word you want to use," Bertrand said. "They are an unbelievably talented and unbelievably coached team. We'll take the lessons we've learned and mix them with the challenge in front of us. Tomorrow night can be a wonderful thing for our baseball team if we approach it the right way. I hope the four games we played there help us with the mental approach to tomorrow night's game."