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It's fairly common knowledge at this point that college basketball teams schedule "secret" scrimmages each season. These are events where fans and media aren't allowed and stats aren't supposed to be kept or released.

Marquette participated in one of those scrimmages on Saturday, traveling to Charlottesville, Va., to take on Tony Bennett's defending ACC champion Virginia squad, a top-10 team in both the Coaches' and AP polls. Head coach Steve Wojciechowski said that after weeks of training camp and a pair of public intrasquad scrimmages, his team was anxious to face off against an opponent. According to Wojciechowski, Saturday's scrimmage was a mixed bag, illuminating things that the Golden Eagles can feel good about and others that still need work.

"Virginia being a preseason top-10 team, they're going to show you exactly who you are," Wojciechowski said in a phone interview with the Journal Sentinel. "I think defensively there were areas that we did a good job. Obviously we've got to continue to work on protecting our basket and offensively just getting sharper and learning to play with one another. Those are all things that, especially for a young team with a lot of new roles, you kind of expect and that's what we saw."

Most importantly, especially for a team like Marquette that has a short bench, is that the Golden Eagles emerged from Saturday's approximately two-hour scrimmage at John Paul Jones Arena without suffering any injuries. Unable to talk about specifics, Wojciechowski said there were two players who specifically stood out.

"I think Sandy Cohen had a really good game for a young guy in his first time playing against somebody else," Wojciechowski said. "I was impressed by his performance. Steve Taylor played well. I think those two guys would be the two guys that stood out the most for us in terms of personal performance."

Marquette made a concerted effort to use the trip to Charlottesville as a test run for trips later this year. That meant keeping the same travel and pregame schedule that they would have for a regular season game and included specific team travel attire.

Despite playing at Duke and being on the Blue Devils' staff for 15 years, Wojciechowski said this was his first time being involved with this type of scrimmage. Overall, he saw it as a positive experience.

"I've never been a part of a scrimmage before because at Duke we never had the opportunity because of how much money we made from the exhibition games so it was my first entree into it," he said. "I think it's a great thing for our team to be able to play against an outstanding program and an outstanding team this early so we can figure out who we are right now and who we need to be.

"I think it's a great thing that we were able to do. I'm really happy we were able to do it."

Does that mean he will try to schedule other scrimmages like this in the future? It seems likely.

"We'll look at all the options, but I think that having the scrimmage stay like this is a good thing."