"Our team is on fire," she said.,”The Marquette women's basketball team defeated Concordia (St. Paul) 91-60 today at the Al McGuire Center. Shortly after the game a fire alarm went off, and amidst the sirens head coach Terri Mitchell had a short conclusion about the game.

"Our team is on fire," she said.

It certainly wasn't an understatement as the Golden Eagles cruised to the 31-point victory, never trailing after erasing an early 6-8 deficit. Junior Krystal Ellis led the Golden Eagles with 19 points while dishing out five assists. Senior Svetlana Kovalenko helped give Marquette its post presence, scoring 10 points and eight rebounds, including six on the offensive glass.

"I think rebounding is just a huge focus of our offense because rebounds is life, rebounds means you got a stop," Kovalenko said. "And I give three of those rebounds to Jocelyn Mellen because she got in there and tipped the ball to me and it was like 'look what I found.'"

Today was the first of two exhibition games for Marquette, and Mitchell wasted no time seeing what her team can do by allowing everyone to play for at least 14 minutes.

"Exhibition is just a great opportunity to put out different combinations," Mitchell said. "You see the amount of minutes and I'm really adamant about that, they (the freshmen) are going to have to play a lot. They're half of our roster."

The freshmen combined for 41 of Marquette's 91 points as well as nine of the team's 13 steals.

After the game Mitchell talked about the importance of causing turnovers for this team to score points.

"We can't afford to get into too many half court walk-it-up games, we want to play fast," she said. "We want to pressure the ball as much as possible and we need to get much better at that and that's huge but we had 12 turnovers and we caused 22."

Mitchell displayed her team's ability to cause turnovers by opening the game in a full court press, which Mitchell said the Golden Eagles were forced to abandon for much of the game after committing too many fouls.

Concordia entered the game coming off of a 22-10 season, including the regular season and tournament championship in the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference. The Golden Bears are led by senior center Amanda Behnke, who was named the preseason player of the year in the conference.

Behnke scored 14 points and 10 rebounds against the Golden Eagles while point guard Katie LaViolette led the Golden Bears with 16 points and 9 assists.

Marquette's next and final exhibition game is set for Nov. 7 at the Al McGuire Center against Cardinal Stritch University.

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