Penn State baseball had a weekend to forget after it got swept by Nebraska in three games.

The team played the first-place Cornhuskers tight in the first game, even taking the lead in the sixth inning before a late-game collapse that saw the Nittany Lions lose 8-2. The Huskers won 11-2 in game two and then edged out Penn State 5-3 in the series finale.

Penn State sent right-hander Kyle Virbitsky to the mound for the final game of the series, and the Nittany Lions did a poor job of supporting him. The team committed four errors behind him, and the offense mustered just two runs while he was in the game.

After the game, coach Rob Cooper said he was disappointed the rest of the team didn’t match the effort Virbitsky gave.

“I am so fortunate and lucky to coach Kyle Virbitsky,” Cooper said. “He lays his heart out there every single time. The pride he has for this university and for trying to make this program better, it’s personal to him…I have a hard time looking him in the eye right now ’cause I feel like we didn’t give him the same type of effort that he deserved, that he was giving us.”

Virbitsky battled to work out of trouble quite often Sunday afternoon. Despite allowing six hits, four walks, and hitting a batter, he limited the damage to four runs (three earned) and struck out six batters.

While his final line may not show it, Cooper thinks the 6’7″ right-hander gave the team more than enough to win.

“He pitched great. He competed,” Cooper said. “That’s a good-hitting team, and he kept them off balance. If we made plays, it’s a totally different game. And we didn’t…Wins and losses aren’t about one guy, especially in baseball. It’s just about having the respect for your teammates that you’re going to go out and give them everything you have, and we didn’t do that for him, coaches included.”

Penn State’s offense wasn’t able to push across enough runs in the finale to get the job done, which was one of the themes of the weekend. The Nittany Lions totaled just seven runs across the three games, something that’ll certainly put some extra pressure on the teams’ pitching staff.

While there wasn’t a shortage of hard contact in Sunday’s game, Cooper cited issues with runners on base and the approach as some of the main issues at the plate.

“I think we need to be better,” Cooper said. “I mean, we had runners in scoring position and didn’t do some stuff with it. Understanding what the pitcher is trying to do, but again, it goes back to, ‘OK, I have to be tougher here.’ This isn’t talent or physical. It’s just fear can creep in a lot of different ways.

“And when it makes you doubt what you’re doing or makes you a little bit tentative, and again, nobody is trying to do poorly, but it’s like anything else,” Cooper added. “‘I need to be able to have an answer and a plan so that I can minimize that fear to be able to free myself up and be the best player I can be.’ So, even though it’s not something they’re trying to do, we have to be better at minimizing it so we can be better players.”

While getting swept is certainly demoralizing for a team, the Nittany Lions had an uphill battle all weekend against a Nebraska squad that currently sits at 18-6 and in first place in the Big Ten. Cooper thinks his team can learn some things from the way the Huskers play out on the diamond.

“They’re tough. They compete. They know who they are,” Cooper said. “They don’t give in. They buy into the overall team approach. Like, their outfielders know where to throw the ball, and they take pride in that…If we want to be a national program that has success, we gotta do those things. And saying that you’re trying isn’t good enough.”

Penn State’s 8-16 record through 24 games leaves much to be desired at this point in the season. The team has 20 games left to turn it around, and the squad is aware of what needs to be done in order to start stacking up wins.

“Being willing to lay it out there like Kyle [Virbitsky] does,” Cooper said. “We got 20 more games, so if we want to really try to move this program forward, then we got to go about this thing better to how do you get there…Nobody’s trying to make errors. Nobody is trying to strike out. Nobody is trying to do anything like that. But when it happens, you have to ask yourself, ‘Why? Why did that happen, and what do I need to do to get better so I can help us improve?’ If not, it might be a talent issue, and we have a whole different discussion.”