On the first day of school (for you suckers who - unlike me - couldn't avoid Wednesday classes), it's fitting to welcome you all to another exciting year of Penn sports. Good to see we're off to a flying start with the three Quakers teams that have started their seasons going a combined 0-3-1.

"It could have been worse." Penn soccer optimists - and senior captain Dan Cepero - were reduced to that phrase after Monday's 2-0 defeat to Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pa. The game was a rematch from last year's clash at Rhodes Field, which Penn won, 2-1. This time around, the Quakers were never a threat to the Mountainhawks, who outshot Penn 17-6.

After a virtually nonexistent preseason, the women's soccer team salvaged a scoreless draw against a formidable Rice squad in its season opener on Monday. Despite not making it onto the scoresheet, the Quakers performed an impressive opening act. Rice (3-0-1), coming off consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances, opened this season with three straight victories - the best start in school history.

Al Bagnoli is trying to answer a difficult question: What could stop his second-ranked Quakers from reclaiming the Ivy League football title? He got some of the answers Friday during a scrimmage against Division III Widener, which visited Franklin Field for the third straight year for a preseason game.

Despite an 0-2 start to their season, Nyssa Liebermann and the Penn field hockey team have already proven to themselves that they can compete with whatever opponent they play. Now, faced with a matchup against Saint Joseph's tonight, they have another chance to prove it on the field.

Maybe Temple's basketball program is not so different from Penn's after all. Just about a month after Quakers starting guard David Whitehurst was dismissed from Penn for academic reasons, new Owls coach Fran Dunphy will have to deal with the ineligibility of two returning starters - senior center Wayne Marshall and junior guard Mark Tyndale.

When Fran Dunphy ended his 17-year-long tenure as the coach of the Penn basketball program, he set off a chain reaction of personnel shifts that touched colleges around the country: Temple, Brown, Northwestern, even Central Connecticut State. But the one man who may have made the biggest adjustment over the past several months was Glen Miller, the man with whom athletic director Steve Bilsky chose to start the new era of Penn basketball.

After just two seasons coaching Penn, women's squash coach Jack Wyant has been named coach of the U.S. Junior Women's Squash Team. The team will compete in the world championships in Hong Kong next year, but meanwhile, Wyant will continue coaching the Quakers.

When watching Invincible, the viewer is treated to a bird's-eye-view panoramic of the now extinct Veterans' Stadium. But as the camera passes over the top of the concrete giant, an astute viewer will notice that the field is not the artificial turf of the Vet but rather the Sprinturf of Penn's Franklin Field.

Penn graduate Sam Burley ran the third leg of an American record-setting 4x800m relay in Brussels, Belgium on Aug. 25. Burley represented the United States at the Memorial Van Damme meet and broke the world record of 7:03.89 and the U.S. record of 7:06.5. But he and his team never officially held the world record - the Kenyan team ran a time of 7:02.

This summer, Philadelphia lost its chance to host the summer Olympics. On July 26, the United States Olympic Committee eliminated the City of Brotherly Love, along with Houston, from its list of potential U.S. cities for the 2016 Summer Games, leaving just Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the running for America's nomination.

Rudy Fuller no longer has a freshman-heavy team, but he knows that success will not just fall into a team's lap - even an experienced one. Last year, Fuller's men's soccer team played with 11 freshmen. Despite some promising output, especially from leading scorers Mike Klein and Alex Grendi, the season ended on a bitter note.

Al Bagnoli is about to begin his 15th season as Penn's head football coach. In his first 14 years, the Quakers have gone no more than three seasons in a row without winning an Ivy League title. And Penn's last championship came in 2003, so another year without a title would match his longest drought.

Like the rest of the Penn women's soccer team, midfielder Natalie Capuano went into last season with high expectations. But after a couple of ugly losses and a fifth-place Ivy League finish, the Red and Blue closed out their 2005 campaign on a sour note. "We were pretty disappointed with that result," Capuano said.

Looking a few rows up as the Penn football team assembled for their annual photo, the first thing that caught my eye was the hair. It had a certain wavy thickness and was a certain shade of blond that I would have expected to see on a surfer from California, rather than a football player from North Carolina.

When I covered the men's soccer home opener last year, the Quakers shut down a physical Villanova team in a 2-0 win at Rhodes Field. Penn (2-0 at the time) outshot its city rival 13-5 (6-1 on goal). Eric Violante and Keith Vereb looked more like forwards than the fullbacks they are, combining for two goals and an assist.

Field hockey coach Val Cloud doesn't know what to expect from her team. "The challenge is, I have a lot of talent, probably more talent than we've ever had before," Cloud said. "But it's like a puzzle, putting the right people in the right spot who play well together.