Derek Vigoa stepped up to the plate with the bases loaded in the bottom of the eighth inning of Penn baseball's final game of the season. The home contest against Columbia was tied at 9 with two outs. On the mound for the Lions was Brian Valero, a teammate of Vigoa's last season at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami, Fla.

After the final softball game of their Penn careers, seniors Emily Denstedt and Anna Puglisi expressed mixed feelings. According to Puglisi, the game was "fantastic, pretty much as good as it could've gone. It was a great comeback." Denstedt was more disappointed with her own performance.

This weekend's Ivy League Golf Championships were supposed to determine the best team in the conference this year. After a wild finish yesterday, they did anything but. Columbia edged Penn by a single stroke - the Lions shot 10-over par (291-283-284 - 858) compared to Penn's 11-over (285-286-288 - 859) - to capture its second-straight title at the Atlantic City Country Club in Northfield, N.

It may have been easy for the Penn men's track and field team to get lost in the crowd at the Penn Relays this weekend, but Quakers' history was made. The Red and Blue started the Relays off with a bang Wednesday when senior Max Westman won the decathlon, a two-day event, with 6,842 points.

Royal Mitchell heard the gun go off. He drove out of the blocks to begin his 100-meter dash Friday at the Penn Relays. He just didn't know when to stop. A legally blind athlete competing in the Visually Impaired 100-meter dash, Mitchell had to rely on the crowd and the officials around the track to tell him to slow down after he crossed the finish line.

In an effort to boost the transparency of the men's basketball program, Penn Athletics hosted its first annual "town hall" meeting with coach Glen Miller yesterday at the Inn at Penn. In his opening remarks, athletic director Steve Bilsky said that the meeting had been planned since last summer as part of an effort to open up the team to its most loyal supporters - season-ticket holders, former players, parents and alumni - and was not a result of the team's 10-18 performance this season.

EVANSTON, Ill., April 25 - On a cold, wet and windy day, the Penn women's lacrosse ship was sunk by a familiar storm on the shores of Lake Michigan. The No. 3 Quakers traveled to face fellow undefeated No. 1 Northwestern Saturday in a battle of two of three remaining unbeatens in Division I.

Improving Quakers get same result Though the year was different, the result was the same for women's golf at the Ivy League Championships. The Quakers finished fifth for the third-straight year this weekend at the Atlantic City Country Club in Northfield, N.

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In a sport where half a second can separate first from last, 10 years might feel like a long time. Maybe even a little longer for Marion Jones. Two grand-jury testimonies, five doomed-to-be-stripped Olympic medals and six months in jail longer. A full decade after anchoring the Nike International team to victory in the 4x200 meters at the 1999 Penn Relays, the former track star returned to West Philadelphia last night to headline the latest installment of the "Race and Sports" lecture series in Huntsman Hall Auditorium, a program co-sponsored by the Wharton Sports Business Initiative and the Center for Africana Studies.

Towson coach Tony Seaman should feel right at home Sunday at Franklin Field. After all, he is Penn's all-time winningest men's lacrosse coach. Seaman's squad (6-8) visits the Quakers (3-8, 2-4 Ivy) on the heels of a midweek, double-overtime loss to No. 7 Johns Hopkins.

Last weekend, the Penn women's golf team finished just two strokes shy of Yale and host Columbia at the ROAR-EE Invitational. The Quakers slipped from third place to fifth place in the second day of play, but this upcoming weekend they have one last opportunity to outperform its Ancient Eight rivals.

This is it. Two undefeated women's lacrosse powerhouses are about to face off, and one will have to walk away with a tarnished record. However, when No. 3 Penn (13-0) travels to No. 1 Northwestern (16-0) tomorrow at 8 p.m. there will be more at stake than just a perfect record.

There are only two things on the mind of the Penn Softball team going into the last two doubleheaders of the season against Columbia: its seniors, pitcher Emily Denstedt and outfielder Anna Puglisi. As the season comes to a close, the Quakers (12-27-1, 7-9 Ivy) will use this weekend's games to honor their graduating players.

When the Quakers host Columbia Sunday afternoon in their doubleheader season finale, they will have the assistance of a great Philadelphia sports ally: the Phillie Phanatic. Before enjoying the chimerical creature's welcomed support, however, they travel to the Big Apple Saturday where the Lions host a doubleheader of their own.

The Penn men's golf team has finished higher than every Ivy League school it faced over the last two weeks. Now the Quakers are out to prove they can do the same when the stakes are higher at Atlantic City Country Club this weekend. Today through Sunday the course in Northfield, N.

If you ask Tim Hickey about his time coaching girls' track at William Penn High School in the 1970s, you're bound to reel from his musings. "Girls were unofficial at that time, so I was unofficial," he said with a chuckle. It's not without a reason that Hickey began his narrative of his career with girls' high school track tongue-in-cheek.