Bryce Darnell’s team is going to have to have some help.

The Lions will need help from the conference’s top-six teams, not to mention help from themselves with some wins, to make the MIAA Postseason tournament.

“We have to worry about SBU,” Darnell said. “If we play well this weekend it’ll come down to the final weekend against [Fort] Hays. We’re fighting basically Washburn and Northwest, the good thing is we have the tiebreaker over Northwest and another good thing is Washburn’s got Emporia. We just have to worry about ourselves. We just have to play better baseball.”

Sitting at ninth place in conference, Southern will face MIAA bottom-feeder Southwest Baptist in a four-game series this weekend. The Bearcats, [6-33 overall, 5-31 MIAA] will come to Joplin having lost 19 of their last 21 games.

“They’ve struggled really in a lot of areas,” Darnell said. “I don’t know if I can pinpoint what they do best. I know they’ve got one good pitcher who’ll strike you out some. That’s kind of been a little bugaboo for us. We have to really, as I’ve said before, I know it sounds cliché, but we have to worry about ourselves. We have to get hits in spots, and we have to make plays in spots, if we can do those things as we haven’t done a lot of times this year, we’ll be fine. It’s just a matter of doing it.”

Last weekend Southern waited out a pesky storm system to get all four scheduled games against Lincoln in.

Friday afternoon’s games were both delayed, the first one for 2:20 and the second for 1:05. After the combined 3:25 of delays, the Lions split with the Blue Tigers, dropping their record to 18-24 overall.