Although some of the best athletes in the world came to compete at Franklin Field just months ago, it is the Penn track and field runners that have been doing the globetrotting as of late.
Their travels came courtesy of a long summer trip to England, where the best athletes from Penn and Cornell traveled to England -- to compete, but also to discover what being a student-athlete is like across the Atlantic.
The Penn and Big Red athletes -- 13 men and 9 women from the Quakers -- qualified for the trip, which includes the fabled TransAtlantic Series with Oxford/Cambridge, through a variety of events, including the Heptagonals and the Penn Relays.
"It's slightly different for both the men and women, but we give both teams a specific criteria so that we come up with enough athletes to fill the teams," said Penn coach Charlie Powell, back in Philadelphia.
"We don't want to go over there with a ton of sprinters or a ton of distance runners and not be able to cover all of our events."
"It's not really the caliber of [most] international competition," said Courtney Jaworski, a 2006 graduate who will continue his running career professionally. But "it's a chance to reflect on past years."
It is also a chance that comes along only once for most collegiate runners. The trip is traditionally made only once every four years for the Penn-Cornell contingent. A team comprised of the best athletes from Yale and Harvard journey to England with the same frequency, two years removed from the other Ivy League squad. And in the remaining seasons, it is the British schools who are the visitors.
"Our kids stay in the dorms with the kids from Birmingham University, Oxford, and Cambridge," Powell said. "It's an opportunity to see what life is like on the other side."
The athletic institutions are certainly different on that other side. British runners join regional or city 'clubs' that train them from their early teen years into college, Powell said.
The focus of the trip was athletics, though, and the crux of the Series was the 23rd matchup with Oxford/Cambridge, which was held at Cambridge for the first time ever. The representatives of the Ivy League won the men's and women's competitions, taking a combined 27 of 38 events.
Powell said, "It was a very, very productive couple of weeks for us, and I think the kids had an outstanding time."
"At the end of the day, we ended up winning," said Jaworski, who notched one more win in his storied career in a Penn uniform.
