By: Jason Pugh, Associate Athletic Director for External Relations
FAYETTEVILLE, Arkansas – With its home regular season concluded, the Northwestern State baseball team opens a season-ending, six-game road trip at the home of a familiar face.
The Demons will face No. 16/22 Arkansas in the opener of a two-game, midweek series at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Baum-Walker Stadium. The series concludes at 3 p.m. Wednesday. Both games will air on SEC Network Plus with radio coverage on 100.7 FM KZBL in Natchitoches.
Northwestern's first visit to Fayetteville in seven years will come with a couple of constants. One is a meeting with a nationally ranked Razorback squad while the other is the man that has skippered Arkansas for nearly a quarter century.
"We want to take advantage of every aspect of the opportunity," third-year head coach
Chris Bertrand said. "It's another opportunity challenge ourselves against a tremendous baseball team. It's another opportunity to get some guys some work. It's another opportunity for us to play in a venue and in an environment where, eventually when we get the program where we need it to be, we have an opportunity to play in those types of baseball games in the NCAA Tournament.
"We want to take advantage of every set of opportunities that is presented before us, and it's special because it comes against a man in coach (Dave) Van Horn that has ties and a very special connection to Demonland."
Van Horn, in his 24
th season at Arkansas, spent three seasons as the head coach at Northwestern from 1995-97. He led the Demons to a 106-65 mark and a pair of Southland Conference regular-season championships.
He has the Razorbacks (29-16) in the top 25 again this season, marking the first games against ranked teams this season for the Demons (25-18).
The two games will be the second and third of the season for Northwestern against Southeastern Conference opponents. Earlier this year, the Demons fell at LSU 4-2.
"I felt like against LSU, the level of competitiveness that we brought, the level of execution that we brought, the way we stepped up to the moment, put us in a position to where we were one swing away," Bertrand said. "We were one swing away, one play away, one pitch away from coming away with it. That's all you can ask of yourself is that you compete in a manner in which you put yourself in position to be successful and you give yourself a chance to win the baseball game, and we did that.
"Hopefully, we can learn from that and replicate that type of not just performance, but we can replicate that type of competitiveness the next two nights."
The Demons seemingly have some momentum on their side after taking two of three games from Stephen F. Austin in a weekend series in Natchitoches.
Northwestern hit .343 on the weekend and averaged seven runs per game after having scored 12 total runs in its previous six games.
"There's so much take from the weekend, especially how our offense responded and the way we did a bunch of different things with a bunch of guys," Bertrand said. "We pitched the baseball really well other than the crooked numbers. We posted zeroes in the error column in darn near every game. The message to the team postgame (Sunday) was that we had to be mature in understanding the bad feeling in the gut was because of opportunity missed, because of what the game could have meant had we found a way to get in the win column. I don't want them disappointed in how they competed and played. We just have to find ways, when we're in a game like that again, to make adjustments or responses a little quicker."
