Second-year Wharton MBA student Yogesh Maurya can no longer play for a nationally ranked soccer team like he did as an undergraduate at Columbia University. But as a member of the Wharton Football Club, he found a way to keep up with his favorite sport.
Maurya is one of 70 graduate students on the team, which will face 20 other business-school soccer teams this weekend at the Texas Winter Classic in Austin, Texas.
As he and his teammates prepare themselves for the business world with classes in subjects like finance and real estate, Maurya says the team helps him feel like an undergraduate again.
"We're getting older, so we try to keep it fun and nostalgic," Maurya said.
Hundreds of Penn graduate students play both intramural and interscholastic sports each year.
They play in rugby and soccer tournaments as far away as New Hampshire and North Carolina, against teams from schools like like Harvard, Yale and Columbia.
Other graduate students are participating in intramural sports that range from flag football to basketball.
And no matter how hard they're studying, these graduate students find time for their teams -- the Wharton Football Club practices three times per week.
Of the graduate teams, the Wharton Wharthogs, a graduate student rugby team, the Wharton-Football Club, the Wharton Volleyball Club and the Penn Cycling Team compete interscholastically.
This season there are 15 teams in Penn's graduate/faculty/staff basketball league, according to Assistant Director for Structured Sports Ryan Buries.
Last fall, Penn's 13 teams played flag football in the same league. Creative team names are as much a part of the competition as the sport itself. Team names range from Sigmoid Flexure -- a team of School of Veterinary Medicine students -- to Gogo Gastric Juice.
The Dutch Ovens, a flag football team representing the Dental School, went undefeated in the league until they lost to a group of Medical School students, said Dental student Lucas Mantilla.
The Wharton Wharthogs, made up of 45 Wharton MBA students, competes against teams from Australia and the United Kingdom, according to Wharthogs co-President J.T. Clark.
The Wharthogs practice twice a week and will travel to South Africa over spring break to train with professional rugby teams, Clark said.
"We're not competing until winter chills out a bit ... [but] once spring hits, we'll have games on Saturdays," Clark said.
Every April, the team participates in the MBA World Rugby Championships held at Duke University. This year it will face 28 other teams, including squads from the Harvard Business School, the Yale School of Management, Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, and Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.
The team even hosts its own tournament here at Penn each fall -- Hogfest.
Graduate students also make up a big part of the Penn cycling team. Out of the group's 47 members, 22 are graduate students.
Penn's Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, the graduate student government organization, funds most events for which individual athletic clubs apply, said GAPSA deputy treasurer Hana Oh, a Chemical and Biomedical Engineering graduate student.
GAPSA sponsors a dodgeball and volleyball tournament each year, in which about 150 students participate. This year's tournament was held this month in an effort to help students meet one another, GAPSA vice-chairman and Bioengineering graduate student Mete Civelek said.
"The main aim is mixing and mingling of graduate students," Civelek added.
