BATON ROUGE – With a better forecast ahead of it, the Northwestern State baseball team appears to be in good shape to play its first five-game week of the season.
 
What was supposed to be the second straight five-game week for the Demons begins Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Southern before it wraps up Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. at Tulane on ESPN+. Free streaming audio of Tuesday's game will be available on www.NSUDemons.com and the Northwestern State Athletics mobile app, and Wednesday's game can be heard on 100.7 FM KZBL in Natchitoches.
 
"This will challenge our team against two very different styles of baseball and two very distinctly different programs," third-year head coach Chris Bertrand said. "We're looking forward to the opportunity to compete, but we're also looking forward to the opportunity to get better and continue to discover things about our own team because of the way we're going to be challenged."
 
Northwestern (13-7) enters Tuesday's game on a season-long, six-game win streak, including a 4-0 homestand that concluded with a three-game sweep of Southland Conference opponent Texas A&M-Corpus Christi this past weekend.
 
The Demons used six pitchers to get through the weekend, leaving plenty of arms fresh for the back-to-back road games.
 
Northwestern will start left-handers Jacob LeBlanc (2-1, 3.12) and Carter White (0-3, 11.42) against Southern and Tulane, respectively.
 
"It creates great opportunity for those arms," Bertrand said. "What better than to be your best against those type of challenges and to help our team grown and advance through a Tuesday-Wednesday and help yourself continue to carve out a role or get a level of experience that's going to bring you value for the remainder of the season? To some degree, you can put some skins on the wall – both individually and for us as a team."
 
Southern (6-13) and Northwestern squared off in a pair of games this past fall in Natchitoches. Tuesday's game will mark the first meeting between the teams in more than six years, as the Demons travel to Lee-Hines Field for the first time since 2020.
 
The Jaguars will challenge Northwestern in a way few of the Demons' first nine opponents have – with the running game. Southern's 61 stolen bases rank fifth nationally while its 3.21 steals per game is the sixth-best mark in the nation.
 
"They're bringing a very potent and a very explosive – or potentially explosive – offense to the table," Bertrand said. "Sixty-one stolen bases and hitting almost .380, they're going to bring an offense that is going to make us be at our best from a pitch-execution standpoint. We're going to have to be at our best from a defensive standpoint. We're going to have to limit free bases. We need to limit the amount of things we give over as gifts, and we're going to have to make them earn everything."
 
The Demons' second road game of the week takes them to Tulane (9-11) for the second straight season after Northwestern dropped an 8-4 decision on April 2, 2025.
 
This year's edition of the Green Wave has ridden a roller coaster against a schedule that has included five games against ranked teams. The Green Wave are 1-4 in those games, defeating then-No. 17 TCU, 8-4, in the first game of a March 8 doubleheader in Fort Worth, Texas.
 
"They're one of the bluebloods in college baseball, especially in the state of Louisiana," Bertrand said. "It presents, again, a great opportunity and great challenge. When you look at their schedule and the teams they've played, that's a ball club that's got skins on the wall through 20 games, and they're going to be ready and prepared. They're going into conference play in the weekend that follows, so they're in search of their best baseball and getting themselves prepared to go into that.
 
"It's also an environment that I'm excited to show our team, because that's a program that knows how to play in the postseason, knows how to get into the postseason. That ballpark has hosted regionals. With the tradition they have, we maintain all along that, if our program is ultimately going to get to a point where we all want it to get to, you challenge yourselves against those types of teams and then whatever the result is, you find what of value you can take from playing in that type of environment against that type of team and use it to benefit you."