Even though both Penn squash teams will be taking on Trinity this weekend, each is headed in a different direction.
For the No. 4-ranked men's side (7-0, 3-0 Ivy), Hartford, Conn. will not be a welcoming place. The No. 1 Bantams (11-0) have only lost one game all year, and they haven't dropped any of their last 155 matches. That's over eight years of winning, making their streak the nation's longest in any intercollegiate sport.
Beating them on Saturday would be a huge feat, and it's a challenge that some members of the Red and Blue aren't shying away from.
"This is a good test for us," senior Gilly Lane said. "In order to see how good you are, you have to play the best."
Other team members have set much more tangible goals. Senior Parker Justi said that "if all of us play our best, we could come out with three matches. We'd be happy with 6-3."
Last week against Franklin & Marshall, the Quakers won by a disappointing 7-2 margin.
Because even though it had rested some regulars, Penn expected to perform better against an inexperienced team ranked seventeenth nationally.
Nonetheless, coach Craig Thorpe-Clark believes that the team should have a positive mentality going into a daunting weekend.
"Trinity has everything to lose. We have everything to gain," he said. "We can go out and play unencumbered squash."
Although Trinity's women's team is not the monster that the men's team is, beating them will still be a great win for the Lady Quakers.
Luckily, the Red and Blue women (5-0, 3-0) go into their match ranked No. 1 and also have home court advantage when No. 3 Trinity (9-0) visits Philadelphia on Sunday.
According to captain Paula Pearson, "it's a big advantage" because Trinity's court is so different from Ringe. Instead of just the glass-backed court as at Penn, the Bantams play in an all-glass box.
"For them to play a big match on a different court, they're going to have to adjust while we've played here almost every day," she said.
The Quakers are coming off a 9-0 victory over F&M;, even though four of their top starters were out playing in the Liberty Bell Open.
By some indications, Trinity's women have struggled. They limped to a 7-2 win against
Williams earlier this year, a team that Penn beat 9-0.
But the Bantams are also coming off their best win of the season: a 5-4 victory over Yale, beating the Elis by the same margin the Quakers did in December.
"It's going to be very evenly-matched," senior Radhika Ahluwalia said. "I think it will come down to who's doing the little things right on that day."
But there will be no rest for the weary Penn squads after this weekend.
The Trinity matches kick off a tough three-game stretch for both teams. On Wednesday, they will travel to Princeton to take on a formidable Tigers program. Ten days later, they'll face a Harvard team that has also proved a tough foe to put away.
Even for a team that swept Yale in historic fashion earlier this year, that stretch is no easy task.
But at least for the men's team, the real "tough foe" comes this weekend.
