Even though the NIU women’s volleyball team isn’t the odds-on favorite to capture the North Star Conference title this weekend, it stands a pretty good chance of winning it.

Why? Simple. The Huskies have won eight-straight matches and haven’t lost an NSC match since Oct. 19, when Illinois-Chicago beat them in the conference opener. NIU dominates the conference in both team and individual statistics, and the Huskies will be playing the tournament at Chick Evans Field House.

That’s right. The 17-8 Huskies (6-1 in the NSC) are hosting this year’s tournament, and only three teams (none of which are in the NSC) have managed to beat them at home this year.

“We’re excited about hosting the conference tournament,” NIU head coach Pete Waite said. “It does give us a home-court advantage, and we’ve had good success at home this year (12-3). So I hope people turn out to support us. Our goal, of course, is to win the tournament.”

Achieving that goal will not be easy. Standing between NIU and the conference crown will be No. 1 seed UIC (19-15, 6-1). And the Flames are pretty hot themselves. UIC has won five of their last eight matches, including four straight against conference foes.

“The tournament favorite has to be UIC,” Waite said. “We have the same conference record, but they defeated us in head-to-head competition, so we are the underdog.”

The tournament field of eight teams is divided into two pools which will each play a round robin on Saturday. The top two teams from each pool will then advance to semi-final play at 10 a.m. and noon Sunday. The losers will play for third place at 2 p.m. followed by the championship match at 5 p.m.

NIU will open the round-robin phase against DePaul (16-19, 3-4) at 9 a.m. and then play Valparaiso (4-28, 3-4) at 1 p.m Saturday. Both teams played the Huskies tough during the season and should pose an early challenge to NIU.

“All of (our matches) are going to be real challenges for us to come out and play hard,” Waite said. “The last time we played both DePaul and Valparaiso, they took us to five games. I think we’ve improved a lot since then, and we have something to prove to everybody in the conference to show them that we have improved a lot. So, it will be a challenge to come out and play hard.”

Cleveland State (19-20, 2-5) rounds out the first pool and will face NIU at 5 p.m. in the Huskies’ final round-robin match.

The second pool consists of UIC, Akron (28-15, 5-2), Marquette (11-14, 3-4) and Wisconsin-Green Bay (5-18, 0-7).

“The top two teams (in the second pool) are UIC and Akron,” Waite said. “Those teams should come out of it. When you get into a tournament, anything can happen, though. That’s the exciting part.”