Colonels face little room for error in tourney race

On paper, Nicholls baseball’s 17-21 record may not present any visible signs of a team that has improved, but considering the team only won 10 games total last season, it’s a record they’ll take with 15 games still to play.

Following last Tuesday’s game against South Alabama, the Colonels were eighth in the Southland Conference with an 8-13 overall record.

Just as in all Southland Conference sports, the top eight teams earn a berth in the conference tournament. From the season’s outset, head coach Chip Durham had hoped his team would be in the hunt for a conference tournament berth.

The Colonels still have work to do, as they are tied for that spot with McNeese State.

“There is still a lot of baseball left,” the coach said. “We don’t want to have to rely on other teams to win for us to get a spot in the tournament. We want to control our own destiny.”

Nicholls appeared to make strides toward maintaining that goal last week with a shocking 3-1 upset victory over the then number one team in the country – LSU, but getting swept against conference foe Sam Houston State in their three-game series this weekend didn’t help the Colonels gain any ground in the standings.

In order for Nicholls to remain competitive, Durham said the team must hit the ball better and put runs on the board.

Against the Tigers, the Colonels notched four hits but finished with three runs. However, in the three losses to the Bearkats, Nicholls managed just two runs in the entire series.

The Colonels are currently last in the conference with a .275 batting average through 38 games this season.

“We can’t dig ourselves in a hole in this conference,” Durham said. “We’re in a funk right now. We played well the last week-and-a-half to two weeks, but we just aren’t swinging the bats very well right now. We’re letting negative energy carry over from game to game and it hurts.”

Getting back on track will require Nicholls’ bench to step up.

Currently six Colonels starters are nursing injuries of some kind, including weekend starting pitchers senior Lance Dupuis and sophomore Seth Webster.

“We’re just beat up and banged up right now,” the coach said. “That’s the grind of the season. We can’t make any excuses. We have other guys there and they have to step up and perform.”

With so many games left, Durham remains optimistic his team can continue to fight and claw their way to a spot in the conference tournament by pulling themselves back together.

That’ll take a team effort however, he affirmed.

“We’re letting the rope unravel a little bit and we just have to find a way to tie the knot at the end of it and come together as a team,” he said. “We need to create some positive energy.

“That’s what’s great about this game, we can’t control what’s happened over the last few days but we can work to correct it our next time out,” the coach said. “We need to come out and do something positive.”

Durham predicts that will be the needed change. “If we can do that, there is no reason we can’t be back in the hunt,” he said.

Nicholls State University junior Josh Labiche swings at a pitch against Sam Houston State last week. After upsetting LSU 3-1 last Tuesday, the Colonels were swept by the Bearkats in a three-game series this weekend, hurting their chances to remain in the conference tournament race. * Photo by KYLE CARRIER