In the midst of winter, a bit of the fall made a return in the form of NIU sports.

The NIU women’s volleyball team had a short respite after finishing the 1986 season 11-21. Off-season conditioning began Jan. 20, and practices followed the next day. The Huskies also have thrown a couple of tournaments into the off-season agenda.

“This is easily the most demanding spring I’ve put them through,” said NIU Coach Herb Summers. “The only thing different is we’re doing more team practice than in the past. We used to have more individual practice. We will practice no more than three times per week. But that varies. We have a lot of flexibility.”

Summers said the reason NIU has more team practices this year is most players are on the same level skill-wise.

“It’s not as though I have a lot of girls with a lot of individual problems,” he said. “The areas where we need to work on skill, two, three and four players have the same problem. I think that uses my time more efficiently.”

Summers said serve receiving and defense have been the focus of the most attention so far.

“The things with defense have been mainly individual technique,” he said. “(We are) mainly just doing some things to improve our quickness, arm position and getting to the ball. The players know what we want them to do. We just want to get them in the stage of some habits.

“We’re trying a new serve receive formation. The standard serve receive is to have five people. Others use a four-person receive. The trendy thing now is to have a three-person receive. We are using four people, but it has some elements of the three-person serve receive.”

The conditioning program includes 40 minutes of weightlifting three times a week; 35 minutes of running, which is broken down into three sections, twice a week; and 30 minutes of jump training twice a week. Summers said the weightlifting is to improve strength and power, while the running is used to build endurance.

“It sounds like a lot, but we used to do it spread out all during the day,” he said. “But now it’s just from 3 to 6 (p.m.) three times a week.”

NIU has participated in two tournaments in the off-season. The matches are not played like those in the regular season. Each match consists of only two games. Each team in the tourney is put in a pool, where a team plays the other teams in its pool.

NIU’s first tournament appearance was Feb. 7, where 18 teams competed. With three other teams in NIU’s pool, the Huskies went 4-2. NIU advanced to the quarterfinals as a result but then lost the first match in single elimination.

“We played four good games and four bad games,” Summers said. “I did not give us a good team grade.”

NIU played in its second tournament over the weekend with 14 other teams. As part of a five-team pool, NIU went 4-4 but did not qualify for further competition.

“Our level of play was significantly better than in the first tournament,” Summers said.