Sunday's 9-6 victory at Georgetown was an encouraging sign for a Towson team that had lost, 15-11, to Loyola Maryland last week. It also masked a worrisome development.
After racing to an 8-1 lead at halftime, the No. 17 Tigers scored just one more time in the final two quarters. Meanwhile, the Hoyas scored five goals to make Towson fans feel a little more nervous than they would have liked.
Towson coach Shawn Nadelen said the theme of Monday's meetings was a decisive finish to match a strong start.
"That's definitely the message that we're conveying," he said Tuesday. "We understand that possession time is valuable. We have to win faceoffs and get possession that way. Plus, when you do make stops and you have the opportunity to get it to our offensive end, we have to do that. Our mindset wasn't at all to take our foot off the pedal.
"We wanted to keep moving forward and keep playing at the way we liked to play. We just didn't give ourselves an opportunity with our own mistakes that gave them second- and third-chance opportunities."
Some of those mistakes included failing to win any of the seven faceoffs in the second half, botching three of eight clears after going 7 of 8 in the first two quarters, and committing five of nine turnovers.
Those errors contributed to the Tigers losing the time-of-possession battle in the second half. The offense took just six shots after halftime, and Nadelen calculated that the unit had just five what he called "legitimate possessions."
"We definitely struggled getting the ball out of our defensive end with just our own mistakes, a couple of poor decisions with the ball -- either making passes or trying to run through too many guys," he said. "On one possession, we turned the ball over twice trying to clear it, and it caused us to go back on defense, and they ended up scoring. Those are things we're looking to clean up today and tomorrow in practice.
"We definitely didn't face off well in the second half. I thought they did a good job of adjusting to kind of what we did in the first half. So the possession time was definitely outweighed in the second half."