The University of Iowa baseball team is playing it’s first home games of the year this weekend against North Dakota State. Head coach Jack Dahm begins his fourth season, and says the team opened the season at 5-5 playing some warm weather teams. He says his scheduling philosophy is to play a demanding schedule that gets the team ready for the Big Ten.

Dahm says there’s a fine line between playing too tough a schedule where you lose confidence, and a schedule where you get easy wins. Dahm says things have gone well early on and he’s happy with where they are at and says you have to play the tough teams to prepare yourself to play tough teams down the road in the NCAA Tournament.

Dahm says pitching is an area though, where they can improve. Dahm says they haven’t gotten good starting pitching after loosing their starters and top reliever from last year. He says the pitching staff got roughed up a little bit in California against teams that had played more games, but Dahm says this could end up being his best pitching staff at Iowa. Dahm says they still need to fine tune the offense.

Dahm says the offense has been swinging the bats extremely well, but has not been consistent enough. He says the defense has played very well. North Dakota State Bison comes into the weekend with a 2-9 record.