THIBODAUX – Northwestern State's final conference road trip of the season takes it to perhaps the hottest team it will face all season.
 
The Demons (5-39, 2-19) travel down the bayou for a three-game set with Nicholls (25-20, 15-6) winners of 15 straight games, the second longest active winning streak in the country.
 
The Easter week series begins with a 4 p.m. doubleheader on Thursday afternoon and ends with a 1 p.m. Good Friday game. There will be no ESPN+ broadcasts for the series, but live stats will be available through nsudemons.com and updates posted to Twitter/X at @NSUDemonsSB.
 
NSU enters the series after a long week with six conference games over the span of five days, that featured three more games decided by two runs or less and four decided by three or less. The 4-3 win at UIW served as the biggest highlight of the week.
 
With those three more close-game results, the Demons are now 4-15 in those game and 2-11 in Southland games.
 
Although the youngest team in the country has now played more than 40 games, and a ton of close games at that, with 13 players having seen action in 30 or more games this year, their youth still can play a role when the intensity of late-game situations comes calling.
 
In the final two games of the series with Lamar, the Cardinals had two big innings where they scored more than three runs. It was a four-run sixth in game two and a five-run fifth in the finale that were the difference in those games, the only innings in which Lamar scored in those games.
 
Errors in both frames as well as free passes from the pitching circle helped fuel the game-deciding rallies.
 
"In situations like that you usually have more than one senior out there on the field and it's a little easier to handle them," head coach Jenny Fuller said. "With us this year it's definitely trial by fire, but the good news is moving forward they'll all have a lot of experience."
 
A wider view of those games however shows the resolve and ability the team has displayed throughout the conference season.
 
Even after playing nine games in nine days, with a long trip to and back from San Antonio mixed in, the Demons held Lamar scoreless for the first five innings of game two and four innings of game three. They also scored runs of their own following the Cardinals' big innings, showing the grit and fight-to-the-end mentality that opposing teams and coaches have made note of as the season has progressed.
 
"We're getting compliments from other coaches about how hard we're playing and how scrappy we are and how our record doesn't reflect how well we compete with everybody," Fuller said. "That's definitely nice to hear. We're playing the game the right way. We're establishing the standard, which is really important in a rebuild season. We know what we expect and go out there and give it our all."
 
Sophia Livers became the sixth player this season to hit their first career home run, a fifth-inning solo shot in game two against Lamar. Brynn Daniel drove in her 16^th and 17^th runs of the season, the second most on the team, with a seventh-inning double in game three to bring the tying run to the plate.
 
That grit, heart and fight will be a requirement again this weekend, as it is every week in conference play, as the Demons take on a Nicholls team that has its eyes set on a potential top two seed and first round host in the conference tournament.
 
"They're hitting well and pitching well right now and going to be a tough team to beat," Fuller said. "They're hitting .325 as a team and their top hitters are in the .350 and above range. So what I've told our pitchers is we're going to have to go out there with our best stuff. 
 
"And at this point in the season nothing is going to surprise us. We have seen the best of the best so we can just go out there and play."
 
Nicholls last lost a game on March 22, a 5-1 defeat at McNeese as part of a three-game sweep by the Cowgirls.
 
Since then, they have scored an average of 7.5 runs per game on 11.3 hits per game with 10 double-digit hit games during their 15-game winning streak. Colonel batters had won the past four conference hitter of the week awards with junior Erin Krause claiming the past two awards.
 
Krause has had two or more hits in nine of the last 10 games and has collected 22 of her 46 hits this season over the past 10 games.
 
She has helped provide plenty of offense for a pitching staff that has held Southland opponents to just over two runs a game over the past four series and four runs total in their previous six games.
 
Lefty Molly Yoo, the reigning pitcher of the week, went 3-0 last week and did not allow an earned run in 18 innings of work with 13 strikeouts. She held HCU and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi batters to a .180 batting average and only walked one during those 18 innings.