JOURNAL SPORTS
NATCHITOCHES — The Northwestern State baseball team had its chances to jump on longtime rival Louisiana Tech quickly Tuesday night.
While the Demons could not capitalize on their opportunities, the Bulldogs eventually made the most of theirs, generating offense in the middle of the game and silencing Northwestern’s offense en route to a 7-0 victory at Brown-Stroud Field.
It is the first win for the ‘Dogs over NSU on the road since 2022 and their first time shutting out the Demons in Natchitoches since 2016. Northwestern leads the Southland Conference race with four weekend series left.
“I’m very proud of our guys for how they played tonight. This might have been one of our best all-around efforts of the season,” said veteran Tech coach Lane Burroughs, who revitalized the Northwestern program from 2013-16 before moving over to lead the Bulldogs since 2017. “Besides the one error, we played clean baseball all night.”
The Bulldogs won their third straight and rose to 18-16 overall. The Demons lost for only the second time in the last 10 contests and had a four-game win streak end as they slipped to 21-11 heading into a home game tonight at 6 against Southern.
“It’s hard to really do much of anything competitively if you don’t put any runs on the board, because you can’t really move around,” third-year Northwestern coach Chris Bertrand said. “We had opportunities to score some runs early, and it didn’t really work out. Then we allowed a little bit of things not going our way to spill into the competitiveness of our at-bats in the middle of the game.”
Making his first start since May 17, 2024, after missing 2025 due to shoulder surgery, Demons’ graduate right-hander Chase Prestwich (1-1) was sharp early, facing the minimum through three innings.
A first-inning double play erased the lone base runner Prestwich allowed in that time as he kept the Demons locked in a scoreless game.
The Bulldogs (18-16) found their stride in the fourth inning, stringing together five straight hits off Prestwich and Logan Trotter to start a four-run inning.
Colby Lunsford led off with a base hit for the second time in the contest and scored on a Trey Halsey double ripped down the right field line. Colton Coates put runners on the corners with a single followed by an RBI single from Eli Burch.
Matt Houston loaded the bases with the fifth consecutive hit, and Wesley Scott was hit in the foot by a pitch to force in the third run. Cade Patterson had a productive out, pushing in the fourth run on a one-out groundout to second.
Burroughs liked the approach by his hitters.
“The thing I’m most proud of is our two-strike hitting all night. In the four-run inning, I think we had four hits with two strikes, and we battled and competed,” he said. “We did a good job of getting the runners on third in to score-those are some things we’ve struggled with all year is our two-strike approach and getting runners in from third with less than two outs.”
“Chase was great for three innings,” Bertrand said. “That was really, really good. When you look at their crooked number, I think it started as a little bit of an outlier inning. It was five consecutive base hits, which is rare, but we’ve got to find a way to, at some point, shut it down and make it to where it’s still within striking distance. And then when we come out of the bullpen, we’ve got to do a little bit of a better job to not allow them to extend that lead right there.”
While the Tech offense awakened in the middle innings, the Bulldogs’ pitching kept the Northwestern order off balance.
After surrendering four hits in the first three innings, Louisiana Tech limited the Demons to one hit – Noah McNeil’s seventh-inning single – in the final six innings.
Connor Nation (1-1) started the run with two shutout innings of relief before Landon Fontenot, Nate Crider and Riley Fisher closed it out, handing the Demons their second shutout loss of the year.
Thomas Marsala III had the lone multi-hit game for Northwestern, going 2-for-4 with singles in the first and third innings. His one-out single in the third gave the Demons their best threat early, putting runners on first and second with one out.
However, Nation recorded a popout and a strikeout to escape the jam.
“I thought the guys competed,” Bertrand said. “The guys fought. I just didn’t think we were very good on offense tonight. That’s kind of the story of the game. We played really good defense. So we did some really good things, but we also did some poor competitive things.”