The concordia women's team (17-8, 14-2 nsic) held off a late winona state (13-11, 9-7 nsic) charge to earn a 66-63 win in front of a packed gangelhoff center saturday night. The win also is the tenth straight for the golden bears.

the bears jumped out to a 31-18 halftime leading on the strenth of junior amanda behnke's 14 first half points and eight rebounds in 18 minutes. Foul trouble plagued behnke the second half as she finished with her seventh double-double of the season scoring 20 points and grabbing ten rebounds in just 22 minutes. She fouled out at the 3:35 of the second half after playing only four minutes with the bears leading 54-52.

with behnke on the bench most of the second half, sophomore candace olstad and junior katie laviolette stepped up. Olstad finished with 16 points scoring 11 points in the second half, while laviolette finished with 12 points (10 in the second half), nine assists and six rebounds.

with her first assist of the night, laviolette became the school's single-season assist leader, breaking deb harms 1984-85 record of 207. Laviolette now has 216 on the season.

concordia held their largest lead of the game at 39-25 with 13:51 in the second half when winona state went on a 17-4 run to cut the lead to 43-42 with 8:04 to play. They would tie the game twice before taking thier only lead of the game at 52-51 with 5:12 remaining in the game.

the bears would make 8-9 free throws in the last four minutes to seal the win. They would finish the game shooting an impressive 23-27 (85.2) from the free throw line, including 16-18 (88.9) in the second half.

concordia held winona state to just 8-24 (33.3) from the floor in the first half, but went 16-33 (48.5) in the second half, to finish the game 24-57 (42.1), while the bears shot 20-53 (37.7) from field.

winona state was led by shelby krueger with 14 points, on 5-11 from the field, including 4-6 from three point range. Amanda reimer also had 13 and anna wurtz 11.

the bears will have a chance to win at least a share of the nsic regular-season championship next friday (feb. 23rd) when they travel to wayne state. Concordia currently holds a one-game edge over msu moorhead for the top spot with two games to go.

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