Starting Friday, the NIU softball team will spend its Spring Break in Texas and Indiana as the Huskies open the 1992 campaign by playing 21 games in 10 days.

NIU’s first 20 games will take place in Texas, including two tournaments at Texas A&M. NIU will face stiff competition in Texas as the tournament field includes 17th-ranked Minnesota, 6th-ranked Missouri, 16th-ranked Southern Illinois, and the host team, 10th-ranked Texas A&M. NIU’s last game of the week will be at Indiana State.

NIU head coach Dee Abrahamson sees the heavy schedule in the coming 10 days as a way for the Huskies to gain experience early in the season and to prepare them for the conference season ahead.

For a team that has lost four starters from last season, the Huskies will be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

“We need to use this early part of the season to gain experience,” Abrahamson said. “This (week) is the only opportunity we will have to play any teams with a national ranking, and this will help prepare us for the conference.

“We aren’t really that young, but we are inexperienced and hopefully we can get to the level of the teams we will be facing.”

If experience is the goal of the tournament for the Huskies, how about the goals for the season?

“We want to win the last season in the North Star Conference. (The NSC will merge with the Mid-Continent Conference next season.) We also want to play well enough to get into post-season play,” Abrahamson said, “and to do that we need to play at a (higher) level.”