 It is officially the start of a new high school sports season and we will start things off with the Bemidji volleyball team. They finished 14 and 14 last season and are led by Alicia Crens in her first year at the helm. You can expect a smooth transition as Crens was an assistant under the previous head coach, Teresa Colligan, for the past four seasons and has coached in the Bemidji community for the past 13. It makes it a lot easier just because we know who she is, we know how she likes to coach and we've all formed a relationship with her. If anything it's been really nice having her here because she knows how to run things so it's been and like having it your senior year you're not as like when you're younger you're scared to do this so now you're like I'm excited let's go do this it's Alicia. Crens says she's gone to numerous coaches, YouTube videos and her new assistants for advice and tips. The new coaches that I'm bringing in this season also are like hey have you heard of this drill and I'm like no could you please set it up because I am a sponge for that kind of stuff anything new I will take. One thing that's clear is that this year things are going to be fast. Alicia likes to run things really quick pace. Quick pace, lots of running to everything. Very intense, very high pace we get things moving everybody's breaking a sweat. I tell them that two hours is my time and I don't want them to waste my time and I don't want to waste their time so when we're in the gym we're there to work hard give it everything we got we're going to go fast we're going to go quick because we want to get out of the gym. And that speed will help on the court to compensate for the size and power that graduated last year. We got to work on getting a quicker offense because we now have as many of the power hitters so the quicker we run the better the more we'll throw them off. We have a lot of versatile players so we'll be put everywhere and I know we'll give forth a good effort. We can go really far on that defense wins the majority of your games and if you have hitters that are just smart with the ball we can be really successful. And the Lumberjacks will kick off their regular season in about a week and a half in Alexandria. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.