Karin Brower is barely concerned about it. Rudy Fuller is slightly apprehensive. Al Bagnoli says it "scares" him. All three Penn coaches - Brower of women's lacrosse, Fuller of men's soccer and Bagnoli of football - said that the financial-aid reforms at Harvard, Penn, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown have turned the distribution of aid money into a front-burner issue in the Ivy League.

When he left Providence, R.I. and the Brown basketball program for the head coaching job at Penn, Glen Miller was faced with the difficult task of replacing Philadelphia icon Fran Dunphy. But in 1993, 13 years before he took over for Dunphy, Miller was replacing some of the lower-profile denizens of the athletic world.

Not many kids from Andre Wilkins' neighborhood make it to Ivy League schools. In fact, not many kids from the Jane/Finch area of northern Toronto - from where the Cornell guard hails - make it to college at all. The neighborhood has developed a reputation as one of the roughest in Canada and has been compared to Compton, Calif.

Lineman Joe Silberzweig excelled on both sides of the ball at Scarsdale High. Now, the 6-foot-1, 280-pounder is set to throw the offensive playbook out the window to join Al Bagnoli's defensive line next season. He expects to play at nose guard or defensive tackle for Bagnoli.

The decimated women's softball team was only able to keep it together for so long. Already at only 14 players, the roster was further whittled down to 11 thanks to illness and exams before yesterday's doubleheader at Delaware. In fact, the situation was so dire that King rang up Penn soccer midfielder Natalie Capuano - who last played softball in high school - to temporarily join the team.

Bad calls are an unfortunate but ubiquitous aspect of most athletic competitions. But in some college sports - such as tennis and squash - opponents traditionally officiate each other, making bad calls even harder to swallow. Brandon O'Gara, a senior co-captain of the Penn men's tennis team, estimates that cheating occurs about a couple of times each match.

Over the past 50 years, Dr. Jack Ramsay has been involved at all levels of basketball. Originally a high-school coach, Ramsay moved on to his alma mater Saint Joseph's in 1955. From there he became the Philadelphia 76ers GM, and later their coach. After a four-year stop with the Buffalo Braves, he moved to Portland for the next decade, in 1977 leading the Blazers to their only NBA title.

Basketball is just a game for most, a hobby for some and a job for others. But for Penn's Anca Popovici and Drexel's Gabriela Marginean, basketball offered something more. It was a plane ticket to the U.S., a way to continue their educations and to represent their country.

Michael Jordan wore his North Carolina shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform. Wade Boggs ate the same kind of chicken before every game. Patrick Roy talked to his goalposts because they were his "friends." And then there's Quakers lacrosse midfielder Ali DeLuca.

When the Penn softball team travels to Delaware for a doubleheader tomorrow, coach Leslie King will be banking on none of her players getting hurt. No coach wants injuries, but the Quakers are in a particularly precarious situation. At full strength, King's squad consists of 14 players.

Kym Rohn-Taylor never knew if she would have the chance to board an airplane. The Franklin Field security guard has an aversion to flying, and last year she underwent breast-cancer surgery. But now she's back at work, and later this week she'll be up in the sky, off to California.

NCAA bids likely for eight Penn fencers It was a weekend of mixed results for the men's and women's fencing teams. They competed in the NCAA Regionals on Saturday in Madison, N.J., along with Princeton, Temple, Penn State, Haverford, North Carolina, Drew, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Stevens and Fairleigh Dickinson.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - On another night, it might have been a setback. But when leading scorer Tyler Bernardini fouled out after just 18 minutes on Saturday night, Penn had already disappointed in so many ways that one more hardly mattered. Brown shredded Penn's defense, shot a remarkable 64 percent from the field, led by as many points as 39 and put a 75-43 beatdown on the Quakers (11-17, 6-5 Ivy), producing the largest margin of defeat Penn has ever endured in an Ivy League game.

By David Bernstein Staff Writer davidkb@dailypennsylvanian.com NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Even amid Penn's elite teams and Ivy titles of the past few years, Yale's John J. Lee Amphitheater has carried a bit of mystique for the Quakers. Before this season, four of the past six contests there ended in upset victories for the Bulldogs.

It's not often that the Penn men's tennis team faces a former Israeli champion, the No. 40 singles player and the No. 23 doubles team in the nation, all in one weekend. But in matches Friday and Saturday against Maryland and No. 43 Louisville, the Quakers saw their toughest competition all year.

It looks like no one can stop Sara Coenen. After going undefeated in the 100- and 200-yard backstroke in league competition this season, Penn's star sophomore won both titles at the Ivy League Women's Swimming and Diving Championships. The Quakers (7-5, 4-3 Ivy) finished fifth overall, but they broke seven school records in the process.

Fifth place was not what the Penn men's and women's track teams had in mind for this weekend's Heptagonal Indoor Championships at Cornell. Despite several impressive individual accomplishments, both teams fell short of the podium. The women finished in fifth with a total of 45 points, 69 behind first-place Princeton.