Athletics

Penn's sports teams are nicknamed the Quakers, but the teams are often also referred to as The Red & Blue. The athletes participate in the Ivy League and Division I (Division I FCS for football) in the NCAA. In recent decades, they often have been league champions in football (14 times from 1982 to 2010) and basketball (22 times from 1970 to 2006). The first athletic team at Penn was its cricket team.

Rowingedit

Rowing at Penn dates back to at least 1854 with the founding of the University Barge Club. The university currently hosts both heavyweight and lightweight men's teams and an open weight women's team, all of which compete as part of the Eastern Sprints League. Penn Rowing has produced a long list of famous coaches and Olympians, including Susan Francia, John B. Kelly Jr., Joe Burk, Rusty Callow, Harry Parker and Ted Nash. Also, the 1955 men's heavyweight crew is one of only four American university crews to win the Grand Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta. The teams row out of College Boat Club, No.11 Boathouse Row.

Rugbyedit

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The Penn men's rugby football team is one of the oldest collegiate rugby teams in the United States. Indeed, Penn first fielded a team in mid 1870s playing by rules much closer to the rugby union and Association Football code rules (relative to American football rules, as such American football rules had not yet been invented). Among its earliest games was a game against College of New Jersey (which in 1895 changed its name to Princeton) played in Philadelphia on Saturday, November 11, 1876, which was less than two weeks before Princeton met on November 23, 1876 with Harvard and Columbia to confirm that all their games would be played using the rugby union rules. Princeton and Penn played their November 1876 game per a combination of rugby (there were 20 players per side and players were able to touch the ball with their hands) and Association Football codes. The rugby code influence was due, in part, to the fact that some of their students had been educated in English public schools. and by 1869 Princeton was playing with rules substantially identical to rugby.

Among the prominent alumni to play in a 19th century version of rugby (rules that did not allow forward passes or center snaps) was John Heisman, namesake of the Heisman Trophy and an 1892 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Heisman was instrumental in the first decade of the 20th century in changing the rules to more closely relate to present rules of American football.

In 1906, Rugby was reintroduced to Penn by Frank Villeneuve Nicholson (Frank Nicholson (rugby union)) University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine (Class of 1910), who in 1904 had captained the Australian national rugby team in its match against England.Penn played per rugby union code rules at least through 1912, contemporaneously with Penn playing American gridiron football. Evidence of such may be found in an October 22, 1910, Daily Pennsylvanian article (quoted below) and a yearbook photo that rugby per rugby union code was played.

Such is the devotion to English rugby football on the part of University of Pennsylvania's students from New Zealand, Australia, and England that they meet on Franklin Field at 7 o'clock every morning and practice the game. The varsity track and football squads monopolize the field to such an extent that the early hours of the morning are the only ones during which the rugby enthusiasts can play. Any time except Friday, Saturday and Sunday, a squad of 25 men may be seen running through the hardest kind of practice after which they may divide into two teams and play a hard game. Once a week, captain CC Walton, ('11), dental, who hails from New Zealand, gives the enthusiastic players a blackboard talk in which he explains the intricacies of the game in detail.

The player-coach of United States Olympic gold-winning rugby team at the 1924 Summer Olympics was Alan Valentine, who played rugby while at Penn (which he attended during 1921/1922 academic year) as he was getting a Master's degree at Wharton.

As early as fall of 1959 Penn men's rugby became permanent due to leadership of Harry "Joe" Edwin Reagan III Penn's College Class of 1962 and Penn Law Class of 1965, who also went onto help create and incorporate (in 1975) and was Treasurer (in 1981) of USA Rugby and Oreste P. "Rusty" D'Arconte Penn's College Class of 1966 Thus, with D'Arconte's hustle and Reagan's charisma and organizational skills, a team, which had fielded a side of fifteen intermittently from 1910 through 1960, became permanent.

In the early 1980s, Penn women's rugby, led by women such as Penn Law alumna Gigi Sohn, began to compete. Penn women's rugby team is coached, as of 2020, by (a) Adam Dick, a 300-level certified coach with over 15 years of rugby coaching experience including being the first coach of the first women's rugby team at the University of Arizona and who was a four year starter at University of Arizona men's first XV rugby team and (b) Philly women's player Kate Hallinan.

Penn's men's rugby team plays in the Ivy Rugby Conference and have finished as runners-up in both 15s and 7s. As of 2011update, the club uses the state-of-the-art facilities at Penn Park. Quakers Rugby played on national TV at the 2013 Collegiate Rugby Championship, a college rugby tournament played every June at PPL Park in Philadelphia and broadcast live on NBC. In their inaugural year of participation, the Penn men's rugby team won the Shield Competition, beating local rivals Temple University 17–12 in the final. In doing so, they became the first Philadelphia team to beat a non-Philadelphia team in CRC history, with a 14–12 win over the University of Texas in the Shield semifinal.

Penn men's rugby, as of 2020, is coached by Tiger Bax, a former professional rugby player hailing from Cape Town, South Africa, whose playing experience includes stints in the Super Rugby competition with the Stormers (15s) and Mighty Mohicans (7s), as well as with the Gallagher Premiership Rugby side, Saracens, and whose coaching experience includes three successful years as coach at Valley Rugby Football Club in Hong Kong; and Tyler May, from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, who played rugby at Pennsylvania State University where he was a first XV player for three years.

Players on the 2019 men's team came from 11 different countries: Australia, Botswana, Chile, Great Britain, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, South Africa, and the United States).

Penn's graduate and professional schools also fielded rugby teams. The Penn Law Rugby team (1985 through 1993) counts among its alumni Jay Clayton, Penn Law Class of 1993, and the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Wharton rugby team has competed from 1978 to the present.

Cricketedit

In the latter half of the 19th century and early 20th Philadelphia was the center of cricket in the United States. Cricket had gained in popularity among the upper class from their travels abroad and cricket clubs sprung up all across the Eastern Seaboard (even today Philadelphia still has three cricket clubs: the Philadelphia, the Merion and the Germantown). Many East Coast universities and colleges fielded cricket teams with the University of Pennsylvania and Haverford College being two of the best in the country. (Cricket was the first organized sport at Pennsylvania.) The Penn Cricket Team frequently toured Canada and the British Isles and even defeated a combined Oxford-Cambridge team in 1895. Perhaps the University's most famous cricket player was George Patterson who went on to play for the professional Philadelphia Cricket Team. Following the First World War, cricket began to experience a serious decline as baseball became the preferred sport of the warmer months, but to this day the University still fields a cricket team.

Footballedit

Penn first fielded a football team against Princeton at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia on November 11, 1876.

Penn football made many contributions to the sport in its early days. During the 1890s, Penn's famed coach and alumnus George Washington Woodruff introduced the quarterback kick, a forerunner of the forward pass, as well as the place-kick from scrimmage and the delayed pass. In 1894, 1895, 1897 and 1904, Penn was generally regarded as the national champion of collegiate football. The achievements of two of Penn's outstanding players from that era, John Heisman, a Law School alumnus, and John Outland, a Penn Med alumnus, are remembered each year with the presentation of the Heisman Trophy to the most outstanding college football player of the year, and the Outland Trophy to the most outstanding college football interior lineman of the year.

Also, each year the Bednarik Award is given to college football's best defensive player. Chuck Bednarik (Class of 1949) was a three-time All-American center/linebacker who starred on the 1947 team and is generally regarded as Penn's all-time finest. In addition to Bednarik, the 1947 squad boasted four-time All-American tackle George Savitsky and three-time All-American halfback Skip Minisi. All three standouts were subsequently elected to the College Football Hall of Fame, as was their coach, George Munger (a star running back at Penn in the early 1930s). Bednarik went on to play for 12 years with the Philadelphia Eagles, becoming the NFL's last 60-minute man. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1969. During his presidency of the institution from 1948 to 1953, Harold Stassen attempted to recultivate Penn's heyday of big-time college football, but the effort lacked support and was short-lived.

ESPN's College GameDay traveled to Penn to highlight the Harvard-Penn game on November 17, 2002, the first time the popular college football show had visited an Ivy League campus.

Basketballedit

Penn basketball is steeped in tradition. Penn made its only (and the Ivy League's second) Final Four appearance in 1979, where the Quakers lost to Magic Johnson-led Michigan State in Salt Lake City. (Dartmouth twice finished second in the tournament in the 1940s, but that was before the beginning of formal League play.) Penn's team is also a member of the Philadelphia Big 5, along with La Salle, Saint Joseph's, Temple and Villanova. In 2007, the men's team won its third consecutive Ivy League title and then lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament to Texas A&M.

Facilitiesedit

Franklin Field is where the Quakers play football, field hockey, lacrosse, sprint football and track and field (and formerly soccer and rugby). It is the oldest stadium still operating for football games and was the first stadium to sport two tiers. It hosted the first commercially televised football game, was once the home field of the Philadelphia Eagles, and was the site of 18 Army–Navy games between 1899 and 1935.

Today it is also used by Penn students for recreation such as intramural and club sports, including touch football and cricket. Franklin Field hosts the annual collegiate track and field event "the Penn Relays."

Penn's home court, the Palestra, is an arena used for men's and women's basketball teams, volleyball teams, wrestling team and Philadelphia Big Five basketball, as well as high school sporting events. The Palestra has hosted more NCAA Tournament basketball games than any other facility. Penn baseball plays its home games at Meiklejohn Stadium.

The Olympic Boycott Games of 1980 was held at the University of Pennsylvania in response to Moscow's hosting of the 1980 Summer Olympics following the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan. Twenty-nine of the boycotting nations participated in the Boycott Games.