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Because the volleyball season is 12 weeks long through the sectional week, fighting for 12 will get the Red Devils to their first sectional final game since beating Highland in 2005.

Lowell has fought each of the first six weeks of the season, beating Andrean and Munster on the first round of the Northwest Crossroads Conference schedule. The 'Devils play Munster for the second time on Thursday.

"Everything that we're doing right now should be to better ourselves," coach Kim Kilmer said after her team lost to Griffith, "to get to sectional week and fight past that."

-- Hillary Smith

At over 6-foot tall, she'd always been a front-line hitter herself, but grew quickly into the setter's role.

This season, she's being utilized both as a setter and has been told to unleash her hitting prowess when she sees fit.

"We're keeping our options open," Andrean coach Naveed Nizam said. "We're going to use her as a weapon and we've given her the green light to swing away when she wants to. We don't want her to be timid, we want her to learn to read and see where the ball's going."

Against Bishop Noll on Tuesday, Nicksic had 3 kills and was 9-for-9 hitting. Her season high is nine kills in a five-set win over Griffith.

First thing to watch for this season are a few rules alterations that were announced by the National Federation in January. The three most important are that coaches are now allowed to stand during play (yep, they had to sit before a serve in the past), that the ball can be multiple colors (at least a third of it has to be white, though) and that players are now allowed to wear bobby pins in their hair (there was a fear in the past of injury in case of contact, but those bangs and fly-aways can be plastered down without the use of hair spray, now). Also important is that the any contact with the ball and the body is now considered legal contact (in the past, anything waist up was considered legal, now a knee touch is a touch).

There are several other changes in the Region, too. New coaches at Andrean, Bishop Noll, Clark, Hobart, Lake Central, Morton, Munster, West Side and Portage will welcome the start of the season. With Anna Boyle now heading up the program at Morton and Bill Gray as an assistant at Lake Central, the coach swapping could make for Sept. 21 (Bishop Noll vs. Morton) and Aug. 25 (Gray's return to Munster's gym) interesting games on the schedule.

The Northwest Crossroads Conference will be a tighter race to the top this year with easily the area's top middle in Munster's Anna Dorn out until mid-Sept., recovering from a broken foot and both the Mustangs and Andrean under new management. Kankakee Valley and Lowell are both experienced and big, Highland has a tough front row and Griffith has been known to make some noise, especially late in the season. With Lauren Swafford expecting her second child in October, Hobart is also under the control of a new head coach.

With big front row gone at Valparaiso (Stefanie Lang is focusing on basketball and '08 player of the year Meghan Romo has is at Northern Illinois) and graduations at Chesterton, the door is opened for Crown Point and Lake Central to fight harder for the No. 2 spot in the DAC (or No. 1 if there's enough fight there to knock off perennial power LaPorte).