Northwestern has two wins in two weeks of high school football, but neither was easy. In week one, a 13-12 win over Palmerton, the winning touchdown came with about three minutes left in the game and was followed by a big defensive play that stopped the Bombers from getting a last-minute, go-ahead touchdown.

Things went a little better last week against Salisbury in a 19-5 win, but penalties and mistakes ruled the night for the Tigers, who trailed at halftime before scoring three times in the second half.

Through the first two weeks, some things stand out for the Tigers.

First, Northwestern has just six first-half points. The Tigers were shutout by Salisbury through the first 24 minutes last week.

Second, the penalties are much higher than a Northwestern team usually generates. Last season, the Tigers drew 48 penalties for 484 yards. This season, they’ve already been penalized 12 times for 100 yards through just two games.

“We’re making it difficult on ourselves,” said Tiger head coach Josh Snyder. “Coming out at the half and being down in two straight games and having to make adjustments, you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself at that point. A lot of it is self-inflicted, being undisciplined, jumping, getting penalties and making a couple mistakes on every play.”

This week, after playing their first two games of the season on the road, Northwestern returns to The Jungle and looks to get comfortable from opening whistle to the final buzzer. Palisades (1-1) comes to town after a win over Wilson last week. Snyder believes that Palisades will bring its usual brand of physical football, but he also knows that the Pirates have a number of young players in key positions.

Snyder is more worried about fixing the issues with his team.

“At this stage in the game, rather than worrying about the difficulties that they present, we’ve got enough stuff of our own to straighten out to make sure that we’re clicking on all cylinders,” said Snyder. “We’ve yet to put a four-quarter game in the books, so we’re working on just fine tuning our own needs.”

Snyder has a lot of young players on his roster as well, which accounts for some of the early growing pains, but even so, Snyder isn’t happy with how things have gone thus far.

“You look at the film Saturday morning and we only ran 33 plays of offense all game,” he said. “It’s the things that we practice, working on hard counts and minding where our hand placement is and the bad snaps. Those are things that we rep and we go over and it’s unfortunate that we have to go through these things.”

Some of Snyder’s players have started just two games at this point in their varsity career, but he is stressing to them that they can’t count on being able to come back every week and need to put together 48 strong minutes of football and not start playing only after half-time. The schedule gets tougher as the season progresses and Snyder is preaching that to his players.

“The better teams aren’t going to let you come back,” he said. “It’s going to be too late by the time you settle in, to come back.”