Sara Young

Freshman shot put and discus thrower Maura Kimmel has blazed her way into Division I athletics with an absolutely dazzling debut to her career. In just her third meet of the indoor season, Kimmel knocked off the school record in the indoor shot put — and she was quite literally just getting started.

As finals week approaches for students around campus and the stress in the air seems to outnumber the pollen count, tensions are rising in the sports world as well. Spring regular seasons are coming to a close, and only several meets stand in the way of Penn track and field's pursuit of regional and national success.

Of the diverse myriad of club sports teams at Penn, club tennis can always count itself among the most successful in comparison to its yearly competition. Only the best are allowed the privilege to compete, a process that trims the team down to an elite group — a group which surprised no one when it announced that it'll be headed to the USTA Tennis On Campus National Championship this week.

This weekend, Penn track and field found itself strewn across the country in three different states and two different time zones to compete in three separate meets: the Stanford Invitational, the Danny Curran Invitational, and the Pepsi Florida Relays. Despite being forced to compete without their teammates, the Quakers made the most of their time apart, registering a number of personal bests and shattering four program records.

Friday morning, Andrew will begin competition in the NCAA Division I Championship meet held at the Indiana University Natatorium in Indianapolis.

For Penn track and field, 2016 was a year brimming with accolades and fraught with never-before-seen accomplishments — but there was still even more left on the table.

Penn track and field teams boasted record-breaking times and history-making performances this weekend at the Ivy League Indoor Heptagonal Championships in New York City. On the women’s side, the Red and Blue earned a total of 13 podium performances to finish second overall. The Penn men weren’t able to find the remarkable success that their female counterparts had, but some epic individual performances exemplified their drive to rank themselves among the very best.

This past weekend, Penn gymnastics travelled to Rutgers to strut its routines in a quad meet against Maryland, Rutgers, and fellow Ivy League foe Yale. Despite notching a total of seven personal career-high marks throughout the evening’s events, the weekend's performances were not as fruitful as the Red and Blue would have hoped, landing them a fourth-place finish for the second straight week.

Penn gymnastics will take to Piscataway, N.J. to show they judges how they balance out against Rutgers, Maryland, and Ivy League rival Yale. The event will mark the team's third quad meet of the season and will be a chance to prove to itself and its opponents that its fundamentals are sound as a beam and its ability to execute is not up for debate.

While many of us look forward to a weekend brimming with what we’d contend are some pretty ambitious party plans, the Red and Blue men’s tennis squad has something bigger and a bit more impactful in their scopes: a weekend-long, tension-packed double matchup in Tennessee.