Saturday could have been quite a day for Penn sports. Four teams are playing at home - women's tennis is hosting the Cissie Leary Invitational, football is playing against Villanova, men's soccer against Harvard and volleyball against Binghamton in the Penn-Sheraton Invitational.
But thanks to some scheduling mishaps and an inconveniently timed religious holiday, Quakers fans can only see complete action from two sports at most, and I'm not sure if this really was the best solution.
While the tennis matches are scheduled for all day, the football game is scheduled to start at 7 p.m., and the soccer and volleyball matches are to begin at 7:30.
My first reaction to this was just plain fury at the athletic department. I thought, "How could they so blatantly prevent students and other Penn fans from watching all of the Quakers' games?"
However, the full explanation for all of this is actually much more complicated and sensitive, and while I'd love to fault someone for this, the worst I can do is say that there was a little misunderstanding.
So here's an attempt to clear the air.
According to an athletic department spokesman, the Ivy League office schedules the weekends for all intra-league games in the various sports. Therefore, Harvard was coming here to compete in men and women's soccer no matter what.
With last year's installation of lights at Rhodes Field, the soccer teams have scheduled Ivy League doubleheaders at 5 and 7:30 p.m. on Saturdays.
The women's game was changed from Saturday to Sunday at Harvard's request, but the men's game remained at 7:30 on Saturday.
Later on, the Penn Athletics spokesman said, CN8 scheduled the football game for 7:30. At that point, it was impossible to change the date of the soccer game, as Harvard also had a road game on Tuesday, so two road trips in three days was not feasible.
The reason the game was not moved to an earlier time was ostensibly the same reason that the volleyball tournament is Saturday and Sunday instead of its traditional Friday and Saturday - the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, which begins Friday evening .
Penn's official policy on religious holidays, taken from the University Almanac, is that "the University also recognizes that there are several religious holidays that affect large numbers of University community members, including Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, the first two days of Passover and Good Friday"
Therefore, the spokesman said, there was strong pressure not to play anything on the first day of the two-day holiday, from Friday at 6:40 p.m. until Saturday at around 7:30.
According to the Web site of the national Jewish collegiate organization, Hillel, about 31 percent of Penn students are Jewish. Undoubtedly, there are at least as many Christians as Jews on campus, so it makes sense that the school's policy only includes Christian and Jewish holidays.
And it's not like the athletic department is thrilled about the schedule, either.
Mike Mahoney, director of Penn's athletic communications department, is unsure of how exactly he will staff all of the events on Saturday.
The reason that only one of the days of Rosh Hashanah is being observed is that it is a common belief of Reform Jews not to celebrate the second day of the holiday - as there are no Reform services scheduled Saturday night or Sunday on the Penn Hillel Web site.
As Reform and unaffiliated Jews - who would not care when a game is scheduled - make up a majority of Jews in the United States, the scheduling makes some sense.
However, my final remaining question is this: While it is nice that the school is being sensitive to Jewish students (and student-athletes - Jews were given the option to not play this weekend, the spokesman said), how many people will it really benefit?
How many Jews are going to end up going to games Saturday night that would not have gone Friday night? Is that more than the number of students who would have attended multiple games on Saturday? That is the question that the athletic department cannot answer, and is the $64,000 question of the weekend.
Hopefully, the decision was not made lightly.
Josh Hirsch is a senior urban studies major from Roslyn, N.Y., and is former Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is jjhirsch@sas.upenn.edu.
