For Penn baseball and softball, Ivy League weekends are action packed marathons of excitement. A lot can change in four games in two days, so any weekday action is often a welcome break from the chaos of the conference title races. This Wednesday, Penn baseball and softball get such a chance.

There are 35 international student-athletes at Penn with 19 different countries represented, ranging from Hong Kong to Egypt to French Guiana. We wanted to highlight some of the athletes that best exemplify the character international students give to the university. These are their stories.

For Wharton 2016 grad, Sam Mattis, the decision to continue his discus training after college wasn’t a hard one. Mattis came up just short of his ultimate goal at the 2016 Olympic Trials, but Mattis knew all along that he wasn’t done with discus.

Heading into this weekend, Penn men’s tennis knew that this was going to be one of, if not the toughest, pair of matches the team would face all season. The Quakers took on Columbia and Cornell this weekend, dropping both matches to the top-25 ranked programs.

It was a busy day for Penn's rowers on Saturday, with the three squads having mixed results. The men's heavyweight crew found themselves on Lake Carnegie, racing against host Princeton and fellow Ivy League rival Columbia.

The Quakers finished 11th out of 14 teams at the Princeton Invitational, a 54 hole tournament at the par-71 Springdale Golf Club. Penn finished with a total team score of 897, or +45, placing them behind five Ivy opponents in Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell and Columbia, and two spots ahead of Brown.

The sun was shining down on Franklin Field on Sunday afternoon for Penn football’s annual intersquad spring game. Unlike most traditional Division I spring games, the Quakers don’t keep score, but rather simulate realistic in-game situations with full contact and referees.

On a hot streak for the ages with an 11-1 record over its last 12 games, maybe it would’ve been useful for Penn baseball to get a taste of humility in its second Ivy League weekend of the season. Unfortunately, Yale and Brown gave the Red and Blue a bit more than they were bargaining for.

On Saturday, Penn track and field continued a string of impressive and record-setting performances at the Virginia Quad Meet. The women's squad finished first overall, while the men came in second, falling only to the host school. The Quakers continued the trend of building up stronger performances as the season progresses, recording 15 top-10 record marks, including three new school records.

Everything in the early going truly pointed to a Penn men’s lacrosse victory, but Brown’s resiliency proved too much to handle, resulting in an 11-8 loss. The Quakers (4-5, 1-3 Ivy) are now on the brink of Ivy League Tournament elimination, as they once again failed to play the complete 60 minutes of lacrosse. 

In sports, records and statistics are often used to tell stories about a player’s journey. For Penn men’s tennis player Nicolas Podesta, his 4-0 record in singles this year certainly tells one story, but it leaves out the incredible journey that brought him to this stage.

The weather may be turning nice, but for Penn tennis, there’s a storm brewing this weekend. Both Red and Blue teams will have their hands full with their first Ivy League doubleheader weekends of the season.

Penn baseball has been on a roll as of late. This weekend, Red and Blue fans will find out just how legit the team really is. The Quakers fresh off a 11-2 shellacking of Big 5 rival Villanova Tuesday, will dive back into conference play this weekend as they travel north for a four-game series, playing Brown and Yale twice apiece.

After falling just short of pulling off a seven-goal comeback against Ivy rival Yale, the Penn men’s lacrosse team will face another tough test this weekend against conference foe and national semifinalist Brown on Saturday.

In yet another action-packed weekend for Penn Athletics, a slew of rowing, golf and track squads will be testing their talents around the country once again.

With women's lacrosse ranked in the top 10 nationally, track and field seeing school records fall left and right, baseball having won ten of its last 11 games and more, the season has seen some supreme successes already — but only one athlete can stand out as the best. Our sports editors take to the roundtable to debate: Who is the Penn Athletics spring season MVP so far?

The first thing one notices about Kevin Gayhardt is his height. At 6-foot-6 inches, the men's lacrosse senior defenseman towers above his own teammates and makes the average observer wonder if lacrosse is the right sport for him. But now? He’s the heart and soul of the defense.