By the time summer rolls around, most college athletes are finished playing sports for their school until fall.
For a few lucky members of the Penn track and field team, that was not the case.
During the last two weeks of June, eight men and eight women from Penn had the privilege of competing against universities across the United Kingdom, joining their track brethren from Cornell for a NCAA-sanctioned trip that happens once every four years.
“It was the perfect way to close out my time at Penn,” said women’s 800-meter specialist Anna Aagenes C’10, who blogged about the trip for the Penn Athletics website and was also recently featured in this blog for her contributions to Penn away from the track.
The Penn and Cornell track teams combined to defeat University of Birmingham Sport in one meet and then Oxford and Cambridge in another, maintaining their winning streak against the two legendary English universities.
But the running, throwing and jumping part of the trip was almost secondary to touring the UK countries. Some highlights included:
- Racing against a steam engine train across the Welsh countryside
- Eating chocolate at Cadbury World in Birmingham
- Punting in the Thames River in Cambridge (standing on a boat, not kicking a football)
- Watching the World Cup among soccer fanatics at a London bar
Another interesting part of the trip for Aagenes was talking to British student-athletes and discovering that college sports are far more imbedded into the fabric of American society than it is across the pond (where club teams are more prevalent). The first scheduled meet, in fact, was turned into an intra-Ivy meet because only a couple of athletes from the school team in Bangor, Wales showed up.
“Some of them wished they had what we had,” Aagenes said. “It gave us a deeper appreciation of how lucky we are. … They just don’t really have the same type of support we have as Division I athletes.”
That type of support was made clear to Aagenes and her teammates as soon as they packed their bags, boarded a plane at JKF and spent two weeks of their summer on an all-expense paid vacation/track tour/ultimate bonding experience.
“It’s a pretty rare thing,” Aagenes said. “I feel very fortunate I was able to do it.”
Here are some more photos from the trip (courtesy of Aagenes):
