Jordan, Sullivan lead 'DP' awards

Honors also went to the women's soccer team and coach Bill Wagner. Honors also went to the women's soccer team and coach Bill Wagner.The Daily Pennsylvanian · With the men's basketball, men's fencing, wrestling and gymnastics teams all laying claim to league titles in the past year, the competition for Team of the Year was highly contested. The title goes not to a league champ but to the deserving members of the women's soccer team. Under the tutelage of first-year coach Andy Nelson, the Quakers recorded their best-ever Ivy League campaign (6-1) while going 13-3-1 overall in the regular season and earning their first-ever trip to the NCAA Tournament. Although Penn fell 1-0 in a tough NCAA loss at James Madison, the Quakers established marks that will be tough to surpass. Sisters Andrea and Jill Callaghan finished their careers as the top two scorers, respectively, in Penn history. And seniors Jen Danielson and Deane Kocivar-Norbury anchored a defense that helped freshman goalie Katherine Hunt post 10 shutouts. · While a case could be made for Nelson, the award for Coach of the Year goes to the long overdue Bill Wagner. In his 30th season as coach of the former lightweight football team, Wagner led the troops to a 5-1 overall record, 3-1 in official Collegiate Sprint Football League games. Although the Quakers ultimately finished second in the league, it marked yet another successful campaign for Penn. Wagner, who also serves as pitching coach for the Red and Blue baseball team, picked up his first share of the sprint football title in '96 when the Quakers also went 5-1. In the past four seasons, his squads have picked up two titles and gone 18-6 overall, 11-5 in league play. · In an individually focused sport, no one performed better in '99 than Molly Sullivan, the DP's Female Athlete of the Year. Although last year's winner, Diana Caramanico, only improved in her continued domination of the Ivy League women's basketball circuit, Sullivan was simply awesome for the Penn gymnastics team. At the ECAC Championships on March 27, the then-senior tied for first on the beam and set a meet record with an amazing 9.900 performance on the floor exercise en route to being named the 1999 ECAC Gymnast of the Year. One month earlier, Sullivan earned the second Ivy Classic all-around title of her career. At the NCAA Region 5 Championship, Sullivan -- just the seventh Quaker ever to qualify for the NCAA Regionals -- finished 16th in the all-around but impressed the region's coaches enough to be named NCAA Northeast Region Co-Gymnast of the Year. The award considers intangibles like leadership and academics as well as one's all-around score. · In 1999, the Penn men's basketball team earned its first outright Ivy League title in four years and finally broke the Princeton curse, snapping a six-game losing streak to the Tigers. Junior co-captain Michael Jordan was instrumental to Penn's success, earning him the nod as the DP's Male Athlete of the Year for '99. Jordan earned first-team All-Big 5 and All-Ivy honors while starting all 27 games and leading the team in four offensive categories, including scoring average (15.3 points per game). Jordan has an opportunity to graduate this year near the top of several all-time statistical categories at Penn while going down as one of the program's all-time greats.