Head coach Mike Kunigonis has baseball sitting just below .500 after 23 games into his first career head coaching job.

The Huskies are 11-12 this season after they were 4-18-1 at this point last season under former head coach Ed Mathey. Still, Kunigonis said he felt the team left three wins on the field.

NIU is working the kinks out as it nears the midway point of the season, and Kunigonis said he’s beginning to see consistency and chemistry on the field.

Off the field, Kunigonis and his staff have implemented the DeKalb Pride Project to build team and community cohesion. The team has performed community service events that have included volunteering at Feed’em Soup, the Barb City Manor Retirement Center, food drives, Little League camps and playing indoor soccer with the Special Olympics on Monday.

Q: How do you feel the season has gone for you personally with it being your first head coaching job?

A: I’ve seen some good, seen some bad, seen some ugly — a little bit of everything.

The best thing about this group is they’re all good kids. They work hard. They want to get to the next level; we’re not quite there yet. But, they want to, and that’s the first step of turning things around is when guys want to get to that next level.

Now comes the hard part is how do we get there.

Q: What will it take to get to that next level?

A: That’s not up to me; that’s up to the guys. It’s up to them to figure that out. As coaches you can point guys in the right direction and show them the way, but at the end of the day they got to do it. It’s like the old saying, ‘You could lead the horse to water, but you can’t force him to drink.’ We’re on the right track and we’re close for this group to do something special.

Q: Have there been any individual moments or games that have stood out to you?

A: The good, bad and ugly is you look at Purdue game No. 1. That team could beat any team that we go up against and give us a chance to win against anybody. I’ll take that team down to Texas Tech and we got a chance to go down there and win. And then the same team two games later was a completely different team still learning how to completely put something together on a full weekend.

Take the Buffalo weekend, for example: again, great day, sweep the doubleheader, lose focus on Sunday and we lose 5-1. So, in that whole weekend you see a lot of things — good things, great things, see where you could build and see where we’re still lacking.

And that’s what I mean by the good, the bad and the ugly. We’ve had flashes of being real good. We’re still learning.

Q: What been your most challenging or frustrating moment this season?

A: I can’t sit down and say, ‘Hey, listen, I really needed to get through this.’ This is no different than any year.

As a coach you live in the moment. And when you’re a competitor and you’re as driven as we are, every loss is the worst thing ever. And then 12 hours later you’re like, ‘We did this well. We did this well. We just have to do a better job of this.’ The thing about our game is you play the next day, and you go out, you play well, you get a win and you feel like a million bucks.

That’s the big thing about coaching, is there’s no one day where we just have to get over this one hump; it’s every day is a grind.

Q: How did the whole DeKalb Pride Project come about?

A: We started that … when I got here. NIU does a tremendous amount of community service with their athletes, and the university as a whole; ‘communiversity’ is one of the big words they use here. I’m coming from a program [Virginia Tech] that has put community service even further out in front to where we want to go above and beyond.

It’s us taking pride in what we do, helping other people, and by doing that you learn a lot about yourself through community service. You learn what it means to help somebody else. You learn how fortunate you are. And then you build relationships, you build friendships that you never thought you’d have. We’re just kind of doing what they’re already doing here. We just kind of put a name on it for us for baseball.