HAMMOND, La. – Double-digit games against NCAA postseason participants, including games at Power 5 opponents LSU, Mississippi State and Oklahoma State, and home series against both Southland Conference regular season champion Sam Houston State and tournament champ Northwestern State highlight another challenging schedule for Southeastern Louisiana in 2019.
The Lions open the 2019 season at home with a three-game series against Louisiana Tech (Feb. 15-17) before traveling down the road to Baton Rouge, Louisiana for a midweek contest at LSU (Feb. 19). Returning to Pat Kenelly Diamond at Alumni Field, Southeastern hosts former College World Series Cinderella Stony Brook in a weekend series (Feb. 22-24).
Closing out the season’s opening month is a pair of midweek games, Feb. 26 at home against UL Lafayette and Feb. 27 at Mississippi State.
After the game in Starkville, Mississippi, the Lions travel to Troy (March 1-3) for a three-game series before returning home for a pair of midweek contests against ULM (March 5-6).
Southeastern opens conference play at home against Central Arkansas (March 8-10), stepping out of conference the next weekend for its trip to Stillwater, Oklahoma (March 15-17). Other Southland home series include Abilene Christian (March 22-24), the tournament champion Demons (April 12-14), Nicholls (April 18-19) and the regular season champ Bearkats (May 10-12).
Road trips in conference take the Lions to Stephen F. Austin (March 29-31), New Orleans (April 5-7), Nicholls (April 20), Texas A&M-Corpus Christi (April 26-28), Lamar (May 3-5) and Incarnate Word (May 16-18).
With in-state rival McNeese sliding off the Lions’ conference slate during the next two-season scheduling cycle, the schools will face each other in a pair of non-conference contests, April 16 in Lake Charles, Louisiana and May 1 in Hammond.
Other key non-conference matchups include games at South Alabama (March 26), UL Lafayette (April 2), Tulane (April 23) and Southern Miss (May 14). Southeastern will host home games against Tulane (April 9) and South Alabama (May 7).
The schedule includes 24 games against teams that finished in the RPI Top-100 last season. That level of competition has allowed Southeastern to establish a school record for attendance each of the last four years. In 2018, more than 43,000 (1,317 per game average) fans attended games at Pat Kenelly Diamond at Alumni Field.
Southeastern will play more than 50 percent of its games on the road 2019. The Lions have 21 games against in-state competition, 12 games against NCAA postseason participants, nine games against Sun Belt Conference foes, seven non-conference games against schools from Top-5 RPI conferences and five games at Power 5 schools.
