The days of Penn being a national basketball powerhouse may be gone, but give the Quakers a frisbee and a field, and they can compete with the best in the country.
For the first time since 1996, the women's Club Ultimate Frisbee team is headed to Nationals.
The Red and Blue will travel to Columbus, Ohio next Friday as the No. 20 seed out of 20 college teams from across North America. Penn plays twice on the first day of the tournament, facing off against No. 9 North Carolina and No. 4 Ottawa.
On day two, the competition includes No. 16 Iowa State and perennial powerhouse No. 5 Stanford.
"The East Coast is not really known for being that strong at ultimate," senior Kate Anthony said. "I think there are definitely some teams that we can beat, but to be realistic, we're not going to win [the championship].
"Out of the 20 teams, if we beat four or five of them . that would be amazing."
The Quakers didn't have an easy road to the big dance. They secured their spot in the Championship Bracket with some gutsy play at the mid-April regional tournament in Princeton, N.J.
Given a No. 3 seed, Penn won its pool by toppling the Tigers, Johns Hopkins and Cornell on the first day of the tournament. Then, against Maryland, the Red and Blue suffered a devastating 15-6 loss that sent them to the consolation bracket where the only hope of receiving a bid was to win out - which they did.
The Quakers rattled off a morning victory over Delaware, then came back to stun the Terrapins and take second place in the tourney, and a bid to the Championship.
"We had been struggling for three years to get there," senior co-captain Whitney Viets said. "For us to really come through this year was huge, and especially for me as a captain . it's something I'm really proud of."
The venue for a typical game of ultimate frisbee features a field roughly equivalent to a football field by dimension. Each team receives a point for catching the frisbee in an endzone, which is a 25-by-40-yard area on either side of the field of play. There is no running with the disc, and throws must be made within ten seconds.
Games are generally played to 13 or 15 points, but a time constraint can be imposed if necessary.
Penn's women's team is called Venus. They run a typical stack offense two ways. A vertical stack has cutters (those who receive throws) single-file behind the handlers (those who throw). A horizontal stack features a football offensive line type setup, with everyone lined across the plane of the disc.
Most of the starting seven are seniors, who have carried Venus thus far this year. But the underclassmen have made their impact, arriving in huge numbers at the beginning of the season to give the Quakers plenty of recruits for years to come.
Team Venus may be happy to be playing in the Championship Bracket, but it's not going to be like tossing the frisbee in the quad - it's game time.
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