For Penn track and field, the importance of Friday’s Fastrack National Invite is crucial.

Penn (16-3, 5-0 Ivy) will host Columbia (12-9, 1-5) on Friday night before welcoming Cornell (13-7, 5-1) to the Palestra on Saturday. The first-place Quakers will be taking on both their closest and most distant competition in the second-place Big Red and the last-place Lions.

It’s a Tuesday night game at Villanova for Penn women’s basketball. At tipoff, in the first chair on the bench, senior captain Keiera Ray intently watches a contest that she won’t be able to enter. Donning her Penn sweats, she is still one of the players. And with clipboard in hand, she is now one of the coaches as well.

This summer, however, three members of the men’s lacrosse team will add white to their color scheme and play for a different and perhaps more meaningful purpose.

As the winter sports start to head down the final stretch, we discussed which Penn Athletics team has the most critical games this upcoming weekend.

If it seems like Penn women’s basketball is playing a slightly different game this year, that’s because they are.

Penn basketball swept Dartmouth and Harvard over the weekend at the Palestra. How did the Quakers manage to secure their first two Ivy wins of the season?

When I, a freshman associate sports editor, was asked to pack my bags and travel to New Hampshire to cover the presidential primary, I was taken aback.

The mystique of Philadelphia college basketball has been well-documented – with the Palestra being named the nation’s most “Hallowed Hall” in a December 2014 NCAA.com feature – and that allure makes it quite difficult for local figures to stay away. For Penn men’s basketball, consider Joe Mihalich Jr. the latest victim.

Cliched or not, practice makes perfect. Just ask Marie Stephan. From the start of the 2014-2015 season, the sophomore has won 25 regular season matches without dropping a single one.

Make that two-thirds. This past weekend another Penn team took home a share of a three-way Ivy League title when men’s fencing finished first in the Championship tournament along with Columbia and Princeton.

With the season opener on Feb. 20 against Michigan around the corner, Penn men’s lacrosse is back to work and has already seen its first live action of 2016 against other teams.

They got just what they needed. In a pair of duals at Brown and Harvard on Feb. 6, Penn wrestling swept the competition. After taking down the Bears, 25-9, in Providence, Ri. the Quakersmade the trek to Cambridge, Ma., and dealt the Crimson a 26-9 beatdown.

Red just wasn’t enough this weekend. This weekend, the Red and Blue gymnastics squad beat their Ivy rival Cornell - the Big Red - to earn their first victory at a tri-meet in the 2015-16 season.

For Penn Tennis, the courts of the Hecht Tennis Center and Penn Park provide a homecourt advantage like no other.

HANOVER, N.H. — Boom. Lights out. So went the end of an closely fought game for Penn women’s basketball at Dartmouth on Saturday night with less than a minute left before the Quakers capped off a 56-41 win in Hanover.

Penn basketball, playing with newfound confidence, continued to move in the right direction by recording its second straight Ivy League win in a 67-57 thrashing of Harvard.