On the surface, the NIU baseball program is really struggling right now—one measly victory in 20 tries. Scratch it a little bit and reality pops up. The program is making strides. Last August, Joe "Spanky" McFarland took the NIU job well aware that...

Saturday was an opening day for some NIU athletes that had nothing to do with baseball. Amidst the hoopla surrounding baseball's opening day, the Huskies football squad officially started spring practice Saturday afternoon. Unlike the five previous spring...

Surprise. The NIU baseball team did it, it finally did it. The setting: Huskie Diamond, the place the Huskies like to call "Field of Dreams." But until Sunday, it had been anything but dreamy for the Huskies. In fact, it had been a field of nightmares,...

The NIU baseball team is desperate. Its head coach, Joe McFarland, hopes his lose-weary club's furious search for victory will be over by the weekend's conclusion. The 0-17 Huskies travel to Valparaiso to play Saturday. NIU will then make its way back...

Zero and 17. What else is there to say about the NIU baseball team which has yet to leave the starting blocks? The Huskies need to win just one game to get the monkey off their backs, yet in this 43-game season, a win seems as distant as an Iraqi victory...

Any coach will tell you that after a team loses several games in a row, it no longer plays to win. When that happens, coaches say, losing becomes expected and contagious. If losing is infectious, it's an epidemic on NIU's baseball team. For the seventeenth...

Spring: The time when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of ... baseball. Until recently, if you were a baseball fan at NIU you had to make do with televised Cubs and Sox games. But last year, the powers-that-be at NIU decided to drop the men's gymnastics...

Going winless in 16 tries would be enough to make anyone want to give up hope, but for NIU's baseball squad, giving up is the last thing in mind. Coming into this season, the players and fans alike knew it would be rough going. This was because the team...

NIU's baseball team had thought its Monday home-opening doubleheader against the Chicago State Cougars would feature its first victory in 1991. The victory-deprived Huskies had thought that because they played the Cougars so competitively in a March 21...

Even with the NIU baseball team's record at 0-14, the last thing the Huskies' head coach Joe "Spanky" McFarland has to worry about is his players' confidence level heading into Monday's doubleheader home opener against Chicago State. "I know we can definitely...

The more things change, the more they ... well, you know the rest of that axiom, and by now, so must the NIU baseball team. As days become weeks, the Huskies' dubious, season-long winless streak continues to grow and rankle. Last weekend, the Huskies...

After going winless in its first nine games, the NIU baseball team has waited long enough to taste its first victory. NIU found out Tuesday it would have to wait at least one more day. After observing the poor-playing surface of their home field Monday...