When Joe “Spanky” McFarland made the decision in 1990 to accept the position as head baseball coach at NIU, he realized that making NIU a winning team would not come easily.

The root of the difficulties that McFarland would face stemmed from the fact that NIU had not had a baseball program in nine years.

In fact, the last time the Huskies played a baseball game, the Milwaukee Brewers were on their way to the World Series, Michael Jordan was finishing his freshman year at North Carolina, and MTV was celebrating its first anniversary on the air.

So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that NIU’s first season in nine years ended up with the team compiling an 11-25 record, including an 18-game losing streak to start the season.

However, after the poor start, the Huskies went 11-7 the rest of the way, a tremendous improvement over a short period of time.

Looking back on the 1991 season, McFarland seemed quite pleased with the team’s performance, especially at season’s end.

“Obviously we would’ve liked to have won more, but I’m very pleased,” McFarland said. “Our goal this season was to play 28 games and legitimize ourselves as a Division I team.

“We wanted to set a good nucleus for the future and we did that. We got all the kinks out and accomplished what we wanted. It was nice to finish strong like that.”

McFarland recognized the difficulty that his players had during their first year.

“It (the season) wasn’t as tough for me as for some of the players,” McFarland said. “Many of the players knew it might be their last year on the team, so the pressure to perform well was always on them.”

In fact that pressure to perform well may have been one of the factors that contributed to the 0-18 start, and when that first win finally came, McFarland felt as if he had seen the ensuing celebration somewhere else before.

“It was like (winning) the seventh game of the World Series,” McFarland said. “After we won, I almost felt sorry for the other team because they had no idea what was going on.

“The win relieved the pressure. Maybe if we had won a game earlier in the year, we may have been able to win more games.”