Towson Center

The last time Coppin State won a game at the Towson Center, Fang Mitchell was in the seventh year of his 26-year reign as the Eagles head coach and on the way to an undefeated season in conference play and a second NCAA tournament. The Eagles ended the 20-year drought Wednesday night by making some clutch shots in the closing seconds for a 64-61 victory. Coppin State's Michael Murray, who entered the game second in the nation with seven double doubles, finished with 15 points and nine rebounds.

  Shoe and apparel retailer Johnston & Murphy has opened in Towson Town Center in Towson. The new 1,842-square-foot store, which opened Friday, is located on the mall's second level in the Crate & Barrel wing, mall officials said. The Towson store, the sixth in Maryland, sells business, leisure and loungewear apparel for men and women. Johnston & Murphy started in 1850 as a men's retailer but introduced a line of women's shoes, clothing and accessories five years ago. UPDATE: Another new location for Johnston & Murphy is a kiosk on concourse A/B at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where the retailer also has a full-sized store on concourse D. The 165-square-foot kiosk opened about a week ago, said a spokeswoman for Airmall USA, the airport's retail manager.

Towson plays its final basketball games Saturday at the Towson Center, its home for 37 years. And then? Lights out. Court adjourned. Next year, the Tigers graduate to the Tiger Arena, a glitzy $72 million, 5,200-seat venue being built adjacent to the present facility. But not before the school pays homage to the Towson Center with a men's-women's doubleheader. At halftime of the men's game against Hofstra, more than two dozen former players and coaches will be introduced, including most of the 1976-77 team that christened the building and went 27-3 - Towson's best mark ever.

It's pretty safe to say that Towson University has been a PR disaster of late. From the ham-handed way it tried to cut its baseball and men's soccer teams to the knuckleheads talking about forming a White Student Union, the school's been in the news for all the wrong reasons. So let's talk about something positive today: Towson's new 5,200-seat arena is about ready to open. And it's a beauty. Before we go any further, I feel compelled to report that as of right now, it's being called Tiger Arena.

For more than a decade, Towson's last regular-season home game has been a sleepy, sad event. It usually signaled the end of another long, losing season and the end of mostly disappointing college basketball careers for seniors playing their last game. For this year's Tigers, there is no postseason after former players couldn't adhere to the rules governing the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate. But there is plenty of hope for an increasingly bright future. In closing their first winning season in 17 years with a sloppy, but satisfying 67-64 victory over Hofstra on Saturday at Towson Center, the Tigers made history by completing the biggest single-season turnaround in NCAA history.

Part of the problem with contemporary rock is that it has come to include such a wide range of sounds that the term itself has become an almost meaningless description.Consider, as an example, the Cocteau Twins' performance at the Towson Center last night. Given the band's instrumentation and orientation, it seems accurate enough to refer to their music as rock. But it's kind of like calling a butterfly a bug; it gets the general idea across, but misses all the important details.This, after all, is a band like no other.

Organizers are scrambling to reschedule after yesterday's postponement of the annual girls basketball game between rivals Mercy and the Institute of Notre Dame.The game, scheduled for last night at the Towson Center, was called at around 4 p.m. when Baltimore County implemented Phase I of the Snow Emergency Plan."Needless to say we're very disappointed," said Mercy coach Mary Ella Marion. "But for the safety of the kids and all the fans this was the only thing we could do."The annual matchup is more than just a basketball game.

Eighteen days have passed since Towson State played its last game, a victory over Loyola College on Dec. 10. It's the longest idle stretch since Terry Truax became coach in 1983.With a 3-5 record and bitten by the flu bug, the Tigers needed the rest.Now, they get Lefty.Charles "Lefty" Driesell brings his James Madison Dukes (4-3) to the Towson Center for tonight's 7: 30 game. The former Maryland coach is 147-101 in nine seasons at James Madison, 671-325 overall.Since being hired at James Madison, the closest Driesell had come to coaching in the Baltimore area was three visits to the Naval Academy during his first three seasons, and a one-point win at Mount St. Mary's in 1990.

If you were to have your picture taken with Bruce Springsteen, it would be easy to make the world believe you were best friends.For The Smithereens, who have also toiled in the bars on the New Jersey shoreline, the hometown connection was almost too simple.None of the members in the band even know Springsteen that well. But there it was in Rolling Stone -- a picture of the band and Springsteen."It's funny, because Luther Vandross, Motley Crue, Alannah Myles and Richie Sambora were all doing work at that studio at the same time," said singer Pat DiNizio, whose band will perform at the Towson Center tonight.

Harford Community College's new APGFCU Arena is quickly becoming the venue of choice for many longtime community events, including high school graduations. This June, five of the county's 10 public high schools plan to hold their commencement exercises at the new arena that opened last fall, according to the graduation schedule released Monday by Harford County Public Schools. The arena seats 2,500 for sporting events and up to 3,200 for other activities, according to the HCC website.

Power was knocked out to about 7,000 customers in the Towson area, including Towson Town Center, around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday because of a problem with a piece of electric distribution equipment, according to Baltimore Gas and Electric spokeswoman Rachael Lighty. All but about 1,000 customers had their power restored by noon, she said. The remaining customers' power was restored by 1:30 p.m. It was about noon when the mall posted an item about the outage on its Twitter page. Other sections of Towson were affected by the outage as well.

Harford Community College's new APGFCU Arena is quickly becoming the venue of choice for many longtime community events, including high school graduations. This June, five of the county's 10 public high schools plan to hold their commencement exercises at the new arena that opened last fall, according to the graduation schedule released Monday by Harford County Public Schools. The arena seats 2,500 for sporting events and up to 3,200 for other activities, according to the HCC website.

Jury deliberations began Tuesday in the trial of a 21-year-old charged with gunning down a teen outside the Towson Town Center Mall just days before Christmas in 2011. Prosecutors say Tyrone Chester Brown Jr., 21, of Baltimore shot and killed Rodney Pridget as an initiation into the Black Guerrilla Family gang. They said Pridget and his girlfriend were followed by another member through the mall on Dec. 19 before he was shot six times. "That was a man who was on a mission and knew what he was going to do," said Deputy State's Attorney Robin Coffin.

Tanisha McTiller scored 28 points for Towson as it beat visiting William & Mary, 79-63, on Saturday night in the final game at Towson Center. The Tigers (11-17, 5-12 Colonial Athletic Association) scored 29points off 26 turnovers in beating the Tribe (7-21, 5-12). McTiller, a junior, became the 15th player in program history to reach 1,000points. Morgan State 65, UMES 28: The host Bears (10-17, 7-7 Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference) held the Hawks (7-18, 3-11) to eight first-half points in the win. UMES shot only 16.1 percent from the field in the game.

For more than a decade, Towson's last regular-season home game has been a sleepy, sad event. It usually signaled the end of another long, losing season and the end of mostly disappointing college basketball careers for seniors playing their last game. For this year's Tigers, there is no postseason after former players couldn't adhere to the rules governing the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate. But there is plenty of hope for an increasingly bright future. In closing their first winning season in 17 years with a sloppy, but satisfying 67-64 victory over Hofstra on Saturday at Towson Center, the Tigers made history by completing the biggest single-season turnaround in NCAA history.

Towson plays its final basketball games Saturday at the Towson Center, its home for 37 years. And then? Lights out. Court adjourned. Next year, the Tigers graduate to the Tiger Arena, a glitzy $72 million, 5,200-seat venue being built adjacent to the present facility. But not before the school pays homage to the Towson Center with a men's-women's doubleheader. At halftime of the men's game against Hofstra, more than two dozen former players and coaches will be introduced, including most of the 1976-77 team that christened the building and went 27-3 - Towson's best mark ever.

It's pretty safe to say that Towson University has been a PR disaster of late. From the ham-handed way it tried to cut its baseball and men's soccer teams to the knuckleheads talking about forming a White Student Union, the school's been in the news for all the wrong reasons. So let's talk about something positive today: Towson's new 5,200-seat arena is about ready to open. And it's a beauty. Before we go any further, I feel compelled to report that as of right now, it's being called Tiger Arena.

When the Providence coaching staff decided last spring that Bilal Dixon didn't fit into its plans for the 2012-13 season, the 6-foot-9, 245-pound center quickly thought of one guy he'd like to play for in his last year of eligibility. "[Pat] Skerry was my man," Dixon said of Towson's second-year coach, a former Friars assistant. "My freshman year I redshirted [at Providence], and Skerry was the head coach of the redshirting squad. He let me play my game. We used to go at it. " Never mind that Dixon fielded inquiries from several high-major schools interested in adding a battle-tested Big East veteran at the 5. Never mind that Dixon had never heard of Towson before Skerry got the coaching job there one year before.