They say the best offense is a good defense. Sometimes, you just need a good offense. For Penn women’s soccer, that is the mantra for this new season.

Five years, two surgeries, four coaches, two schools – women’s soccer’s Paige Lombard has seen it all.

It was a trial by fire for Penn women’s soccer this weekend, as they fell victim to a powerful Maryland side led by a familiar face under the sweltering heat at Rhodes Field.

A season of tempests and droughts. That was the volatile nature of Penn Women’s Soccer’s often-electrifying, often-frustrating 2015 campaign.

The program's greatest team in recent memory lost NCAA All-Americans Sam Mattis and Tommy Awad — as well as other star athletes — but perhaps the most notable loss came from the coaching staff that vaulted the team up to its relative success on the Ivy League and national stages in 2016. 

Success is just a small part of why we cover Penn’s teams, as are the teams themselves. More importantly than the teams, we cover the athletes.

Penn men’s basketball unveiled their 2016-17 schedule Monday, and, much like the team, it will look quite a bit different than in past years. The 27-game schedule features 13 games at the Palestra, including the standard seven versus Ivy opponents.

Men's basketball head coach Steve Donahue officially announced his six Class of 2020 recruits to the team recently to complete the roster for the 2016-17 season. Or so we thought. Donahue announced last week via a press release through Penn Athletics that one more addition has been made to the squad, in the form of a transfer student from Lassen Community College in northern California. 

Penn basketball hasn’t sent a player to the NBA since 2000. That player was none other than Ira Bowman, who still frequents the Palestra as assistant coach to the Quakers.

Penn athletics is seemingly teeming with wunderkinds. Just about every team seems to have their own underclassmen superstar.

I’ve had the privilege of writing for the Daily Pennsylvanian for two full years now, and one particular date is seared into my brain: November 7, 2015. That particular day, undoubtedly, was the most entertaining of my Penn career thus far.

For most of Penn’s undergraduate population, the end of the final exam period signals the time for kicking back, relaxing and fondly looking back at the previous year. But for a very lucky, very small fraction of the student body, the onset of summer simply means business as usual. Playing on a varsity spring sport inherently carries the risk of playing past the school year’s conclusion, and 2016 was no exception.

As the country prepares for the Rio Olympics later this summer, an unprecedented delegation from Penn fought for places on the United States’ swimming roster. 14 Quakers flew to Omaha, Neb.

Though the Penn men’s basketball Class of 2020 has been more or less set for a while now, head coach Steve Donahue made things official when he unveiled the newest Quakers last week. “These young men possess the type of talent and character that good programs are built upon,” the second-year coach said in a statement.

What do you do when you can’t play the sport you love? Turn your fighting energy towards a different arena: the business world. On a hiatus from the game of tennis, 29 year-old Maria Sharapova has chosen to attend Harvard Business School for a two-week summer program.

As the country prepares for the Rio Olympics later this summer, an unprecedented delegation from Penn is in currently trying to fight for places on the United States’ swimming roster.

Dan Leibovitz, a member of Penn’s class of 1996 and assistant coach for the men’s basketball team from 2010-2012, has just been named the Southeastern Conference’s Associate Commissioner for Basketball.