Rewind to four weeks ago.  It was a clear late-August day and Sasha Stephens had just stepped onto Rhodes Field clad in Red and Blue for the first time.

Unlike last year, Penn volleyball coach Kerry Carr has the veteran firepower needed to keep the team from being reliant on freshmen.

An undefeated women’s soccer team will take to Rhodes Field this Friday, one of two squads yet to post a loss in Division I.

As Penn field hockey has demonstrated this year, having star players is nice, but it takes a full team to win.

This weekend, Penn’s cross country will look to divide and conquer.

Sometimes mental challenges are larger than physical ones, even in the game of football.

Penn football’s recent upset victory over Villanova — the program’s first in more than 100 years — has sent tremors throughout the Penn Athletics community.

Going into the 2015 Ivy League football season, I expected a few things: Penn would be better than its underachieving final year under Al Bagnoli.

Facing the defending champions is always a challenge. Facing the defending champions along with the team that just upset them is a nightmare. Such is the schedule for Penn volleyball, who travel Friday to Leede Arena in Hanover, N.H., to battle a hot Dartmouth side, followed by a Saturday trip the Malkin Athletic Center in Cambridge, Mass., to face the 2014 Ivy League victors, Harvard. The Quakers (7-6, 1-0 Ivy)record seem to be in good standing and could be ready for this challenge, coming off of a three-game winning streak, including a 3-1 triumph at Princeton last Friday and a shutout of NJIT on the roadreordered the following day. deleted “Having played only one league game and split the rest, Penn is sitting on a 7-6 record overall.” Despite its extensive non-conferencehyphen schedule, coach Kerry Carr was not concerned about the team’s fatigue going into the weekend's strenuous doubleheader. “I got a lot of different players experience in the preseason, so I feel like we're rested going into the Ivy League,” she said. One of the standout players for Penn this past weekend was senior captain Alexis Genske, who recorded 14 kills and 14 digs against the Tigers and had another 12 kills with fourspelled out digs against the Highlanders. “I think our whole team played really steady, which made it easy to be more aggressive on plays [I] might not normally take a risk on, so that definitely gave me the confidence to swing harder,” Genske said.  “Also, passing and defensively, we were communicating really well, so I knew which balls my teammates were taking, and which ones were my responsibility.” The Red and Blue will certainly need their strength when they take on the Big Green, who narrowly squeezed past the Crimson in a dramatic five-setter last Friday.

They say defense wins championships. But while its too early to talk about championships for Penn field hockey after only one Ivy League contest, it looks like the team’s offense is ready to prove this well-known maxim wrong. After losing to Liberty on the first day of the 2015 season, the Quakers’ attack has been nothing short of unstoppable in the three weeks since.

Tear, strain, break, and fracture. In the midst of a season packed with daily practices and arduous games, injuries are an unfortunate and inevitable part of all sports. For Penn women's soccer, injuries are the ill-fated reality with which they must deal.

Will the residual holiness of the papal visit bless Penn men’s soccer with its first win of the season?

Penn football's stunning win over Villanova last Thursday earned its players some hardware this week. On Monday, sophomore wide receiver Justin Watson was named Ivy League Offensive Player of the Week.

It finally happened.

For all of Penn’s student-athletes, there exists a never-ending juggle between athletic and academic commitments.

Number 29 got the ball with just under seven minutes left in the first quarter of Penn sprint football’s home opener. With the Quakers already up 7-0, the freshman running back looked like he wasn’t going to gain any yardage as multiple Franklin Pierce players made contact with him.  But he shocked everyone by fending off the Quakers' opponents before reeling off another 20 yards into the endzone.

After an average start to the season dotted with wins and losses, the Quakers hit their stride on its first weekend of league play.