GREENVILLE — The East Carolina baseball team consistently loads up its nonconference schedule with premier teams and perennial top-25 members. This weekend is another tough test for the Pirates as they’ll head to Houston to take on former Conference USA foe, Rice.

The Pirates have jumped out to a 10-3 start and a No. 25 ranking by Baseball America. ECU has already faced off with Virginia and Tennessee. The Owls are 6-6 through 12 games and have marquee wins over Arizona and Dallas Baptist.

“We want to play against the best and I thought the first stretch (Virginia, Tennessee and Maryland) was probably tougher than the next two weeks,” said ECU head coach Cliff Godwin. “It’s a different 11 games that we’ll start talking about tomorrow. We’ll have another 11 games and we want to go 8-3 again.”

The starting pitching for Rice has been weaker than expected, though Friday starter Jon Duplantier started to get back on track last week against Central Florida. Duplantier threw eight innings against the Knights and allowed just one hit with 14 strikeouts. However, walks and hit batsmen had the junior in trouble as he allowed two runs in the win.

Saturday starter Blake Fox has been in a difficult stretch and has logged and 0-3 record to start the season and has an ERA hovering at 3.50. The senior has largely handled the toughest tests early in the season for Rice. He took a 6-2 loss to Arizona, a 10-0 defeat against top-10 member Texas Christian and had equal run support in a 2-0 loss to UCF.

Ricardo Salinas has thrown just 11 and two-thirds innings over his first three starts this year and has seen his ERA rise to 12.34. Opposing batters are hitting over .350 against Salinas and he has issued seven walks to 12 strikeouts.

The Pirates are coming off a pair of decisive midweek wins against George Mason. ECU had six players record an RBI, including the first Division I home run by shortstop Wes Phillips, in an 8-1 win Tuesday. Three ECU pitchers, two of whom are freshmen, combined for a five-hit shutout in a 6-0 victory on Wednesday.

After a packed weekend and two midweek games in the last seven days, the Pirates did well to conserve bullpen arms in the midst of a busy schedule. The three ECU weekend starts have been efficient while eating up innings.

Evan Kruczynski has logged 19 and a third innings in his three starts while Jacob Wolfe has turned in 19 in his outings. Sunday starter Jimmy Boyd currently has 16 and two-thirds innings pitched and has a starter-high ERA of 3.78 with a 1-1 record.

It’s still a station-to-station game for ECU, which has seven players hitting over .300, but the Pirates have struggled to deliver with runners in scoring position recently.

Godwin said the most important thing moving forward is confidence at the plate.

“Baseball is a very hard sport,” Godwin said. “It’s a game of failure, especially offensively, and your guys have to stay positive even if we’re not driving those guys in at times. It’s a tougher game than football, basketball or any other game, no offense to those guys. When you fail seven out of 10 times and you’ve got to come ready to play every day, it’ll humble a lot of people.”