MALIBU, California – Can you pack momentum into a suitcase, and if so, will it travel across two time zones?
 
The Northwestern State baseball team will find out, starting Friday evening at 5 p.m. Central Daylight Time as the Demons open a three-game non-conference series at Pepperdine.
 
All three games of the series at Eddy D. Field Stadium, which include a 5 p.m. Saturday start and a 12 p.m. Sunday series finale, will air on ESPN+ with free streaming audio available on www.NSUDemons.com and through the Northwestern State Athletics mobile app, which can be downloaded free for Apple and Android devices.
 
"We understand that you can't tangibly pack that or see it, but what we can do is get on the plane and begin the trip armed with all the lessons we have learned," second-year head coach Chris Bertrand said. "We can be armed with a mind-set of what we want to go out there and learn and achieve. We talk about that length in how we want every single experience – every ball game, every practice, every repetition, every set of travel circumstances – we want to learn something and pull value from everything we do program-wide."
 
What the Demons (28-18) will take with them into their first all-time meeting with the Waves (11-33) is confidence.
 
Northwestern has won eight of its past 10 games, doing so in a variety of ways. In their past four wins, the Demons have scored a pair of run-rule victories – including handing then-No. 4 LSU its first non-conference run-rule loss in program history – a win via a late-game rally and a victory Tuesday night at ULM in which they blew a five-run lead before executing flawlessly to tally the winning run in the top of the ninth.
 
Those wins are part of a process that has helped the Demons post their best 46-game mark in more than a decade. It is, however, an ongoing search that has defined the 2025 roster.
 
"We are still in search of being the grittiest we can be, the toughest we can be," Bertrand said. "We overcome adversity. We are in search of complementary baseball. I believe you can pack a lot of that stuff. If you use it properly, it leads to momentum."
 
The Waves will be the second former national champion the Demons face in a three-team stretch. Pepperdine won the 1992 College World Series championship – a title that was sandwiched between national championships for LSU in 1991 and 1993.
 
Pepperdine finds itself in a similar situation to the one the Demons faced a year ago, building under a first-year coach.
 
Playing on the West Coast for the second time in three seasons – the Demons traveled to Oregon for four games in March 2023 – will expose Northwestern to a different style of baseball than it has faced through most of the first 11 weeks of the regular season.
 
"We are welcoming of that challenge," Bertrand said. "We are thrilled about it. We have talked many times about how we want to challenge ourselves in many different ways. Some of the teams on our schedule hopefully prepared us to combat some of this, and we'll take plenty from it. We'll take what we learn from this series and put it into action the next time we face a West Coast team that plays that style.
 
"Playing against a blueblood, someone we know has a great history, playing against someone we have a ton of respect for – we're seeing the way (head coach) Tyler (LaTorre) is building – they have played a great schedule. We understand no matter where we go and what it says across the chest of the other team, the Demons have to be prepared to play well. The Demons have to be prepared to play clean. The Demons have to be prepared to play complementary baseball. We're going to do it with the lessons we've learned, and we're going to do it while learning more lessons we can use later on."