NIU baseball coach Ed Mathey huddled his team together in center field Sunday afternoon.

Having just been swept by Ball State in a three-game series, Mathey stood before his team and delivered a message.

“I’m not going to stand here and watch this happen,” Mathey said. “We have to pick it up if we want to get back into this race. And we have to do it now.”

Mathey stopped there and let his message soak in. And he’s pretty sure his message hit home.

“At this point, it’s as much a mental thing as it is a physical thing,” Mathey said. “And until we own up to it, we are going to struggle.”

The Huskies are hoping the struggles don’t continue for much longer. NIU (6-16 overall, 0-3 MAC) allowed 33 runs over the weekend in losses of 6-2, 12-4 and 15-5.

And any time NIU had a chance at the win, errors and BSU’s hitters put an end to that.

Trailing 5-3 going into the eighth inning of Sunday’s game, BSU (16-9, 6-0) used two Huskie errors to get five runs across the plate. NIU had six errors in the third game alone.

BSU also almost equalled NIU’s entire hitting output in Game 2 of the series. Led by C.J. Webb, who went 6-for-6 from the plate, the Cardinals connected for 23 hits in the game.

NIU hitters managed 25 hits in all three games combined.

“We were simply outhit [in Game 2],” Mathey said. “There’s not much you can do about that when they are swinging the bat like they were.”

But despite this weekend’s outcome, this is the time for NIU to decide what it wants to do with this year, Eric Sansouci said.

Last season’s MAC schedule started off the same way for the Huskies -NIU was swept in a three-game series by BSU. The Huskies went on to go 14-10 in the MAC.

“It’s all mental right now,” Sansouci said. “I mean it’s just playing baseball. It’s an easy game that we have been playing for all our lives.

“This is the turning point for our season. We can either come together or we can accept [losing]. And I don’t think we want to accept it.”