Kenny Kasper

Recently hired Penn women’s soccer coach Nicole Van Dyke started from humble beginnings, but she comes to Penn with the ambitious goal of putting the Quakers on a national stage. Taking the program to new heights will be no small feat, as Van Dyke succeeds Darren Ambrose, one of the most successful and prolific coaches in Ivy League history.

Penn men’s basketball started Friday with the announcement that junior captain and leading scorer Tony Hicks was been suspended for the weekend’s games against Harvard and Dartmouth. Matters only became worse from there. The Quakers suffered a 69-46 slaughter at the hands of the four-time defending champion Crimson at Lavietes Pavilion Friday night, as Harvard won its 7th straight contest and Penn coach Jerome Allen recorded his 100th loss at the helm of the program. Wesley Saunders led the way for the Crimson (18-5, 8-1 Ivy) with a game-high 15 points while shooting 77.8 percent from the field, and Steve Moundou-Missi added 14 points to go along with four offensive rebounds. Playing without Hicks, who averages 13.0 points per game, the Quakers (7-15, 2-6) committed just three turnovers in the first half and entered the intermission down, 31-24, in large part due to 14 early second-chance points for the Crimson. The Red and Blue managed to cut the lead down to 31-28 with 17:23 remaining in the second half, but after that point, the tide turned for good.

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once said that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference.

If the Quakers are lucky, their youthful squad can force their way into the Ivy race by capitalizing on home court advantage this weekend and sweeping the Big Green and Crimson for the first time in three years.

Following the Quakers’ 83-77 loss to Lafayette Saturday night, Penn basketball coach Jerome Allen said the 2013-14 edition of the Quakers are sorting out who they are. 

Behind two unassisted goals from Midge Purce, the Crimson downed the Quakers 3-0 in the season’s conference opener, as the Red and Blue suffered their first loss to an Ivy foe at home since Oct. 8, 2010.

At the end of the day, the box score has no statistic to demonstrate the brilliance of an individual defender’s play, and what isn’t evident in a box score is rarely appreciated by fans. 

Playing on the road, the Quakers (2-4) will take on a 7-0 Villanova squad that made national headlines with wins over then-no. 2 Kansas and then-no. 23 Iowa to capture the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament championship, vaulting the squad from unranked to No. 14 in the Associated Press poll.

Why did Penn look so flat-footed and ill-prepared at the defensive end in the first half? Did it come down to strategy or motivation, head or heart? If you ask Fran Dougherty, it’s the latter.

For the first time in four seasons, Penn will play Princeton without a chance at an Ivy League title. But the Quakers still have a lot to play for.