by RBR Admin
Finding Franklin Field (Penn Relays 2025, first day), by Orrin Konheim
Finding Franklin Field felt like reading the novel Heart of Darkness, where you keep circling more inward towards the middle of the University of Pennsylvania campus without seeing the actual field. The only signs you might be drawing near are people jogging around in warm-up suits.
Once I got here, I was drawn to the grandeur of the 130-year-old Franklin Stadium, which looks like a hybrid of colonial, Gothic, and Victorian architecture. According to a Google search, Pennsylvania’s campus style is colonial or Victorian Gothic, so I’m on to something. Franklin Stadium was founded in 1895, known as the Penn Relays Carnival. There are a handful of signs around this historic stadium indicating its grandeur.
The stadium has 55,000 seats, and it might be the only collegiate football stadium in the country where there is a higher attendance for track and field (stemming from this one event) than there is for football. According to a communications director at the Penn Relays, this is the largest track and field event in America: There are 2,000 high schools, 200 colleges, 34 states, 28 countries, and nearly 18,000 athletes in attendance. They also stated before I came here that they have over 100,000 fans in attendance each year. Will that be an overestimation? Who will know? The stadium wasn’t complete when I arrived today, but Friday afternoon isn’t the high point.
The action started at 9 a.m. with the High School Boys 4 X 800m heats. It doesn’t strike me as the Penn Relays have a lot of confidence in the event if they’re going to bury it so early. It’s a shame because it’s an inspiring event. After a boatload of 4 X 100m relays, there came, what I imagine would have been some inspiring heats of sprint relays: There were some elementary school shuttle relays and sprint relays for athletes north of 60 and 70 years old.
By the time I got there, the Penn Relays were in the middle of an enormous block of high school 4 X 400m relays that lasted over 3 ½ hours and featured some 46 heats! I like a good 4 X 4 as much as the next person, but it felt like an interesting state of purgatory. The effect here was also a little interesting because the core of every good track meet below the international level is enthusiastic parents cheering in the stands (and even then, the world’s elite have their parents in the stands too, unless you’re an Ingebrigtsen). I had trouble gauging the degree to which parents would sit through so many kids, but there seemed to be few complaints.
“I love this event because it’s so many different cities and states, and so much diversity,” said Robin Bolling, who said she’d pay up to $100 for the event if asked (hopefully Penn Relays doesn’t jack up their price based on this quote).
Jessie LeVasseur, watching her son represent Holy Ghost Preparatory School in Bucks County, said wading through the schedule is tough, but she could have seen herself driving over an hour for this event. A random treat was meeting the sister-in-law of 76ers basketball legend Andre “Top Dolla” Iguodala, whose son was competing for Lower Merion. According to her husband (Andre’s brother), Iguodala attended this race last year, which feels extra special that an All-Star NBA player would support this sport.
It was an exceptionally high point for the crowd when Quincy Wilson and the Bullis boys came out to play towards the end. Wilson qualified for the relay pool at the Paris Olympic Games and participated in the medal-winning 4X400 squad, which ran 3:11.04.
“One of the things we want to do on the team is to make sure this feels normal, meaning we don’t want them to feel separated or isolated. We want them to feel like part of the team and the family,” said Coach Lee when asked what it was like having the meet’s biggest star on his squad.
Downington West ran a top-20 all-time to qualify for the finals in one of the local heats. It was difficult to tell, and even the media professionals couldn’t sort out a list of the qualifying teams, but it seemed like Downing West was a big deal.
After the never-ending 4 X 4s, we proceeded to some elite college athletics: 400 Hurdles, the 1500, the 3K steeplechase, and what was supposed to be the crowning event in the men’s 5K which was supposed to feature a duel between the Ethan Strand/Parker Wolfe duo and Gary Martin, before Martin backed out. Bob Liking did his best to keep things from being an all-UNC sweep, but the Tarheels went 1-2-3, with Colton Sands (coming off a breakout sub-7:40 3K indoor season) passing Liking before the end.
On the women’s side, Boston University’s Vera Sjoberg demolished the field in the last two laps with a 9-second win. Her time of 15:40 barely cracks the top 25 for the year, but no one watching it at home would have known the difference.
The announcing didn’t make it particularly clear in events with multiple heats who actually won the event. Ambodi Liggins of the University of Washington won his 400 m hurdles heat, which bodes well for the Huskies in their upcoming relays (he ran the 400-meter leg in their world-best time). As for this event, he was ninth, and the announcer barely let us know, except for one scant mention that the winner was Devin Nugent of Pittsburgh, who won. The 400-meter hurdles are a great event to watch live, so that was ok.
As the events wound down, the media work was hard at work, and it was a slightly different layout than the last time I covered the NCAAs. According to the media director, there were over 400 media requests. Even stranger, almost none of the people who had covered the NCAA meet with me were here. Instead, most people were college media departments, local publications covering high school sports, and Jamaican publications (I feel confident in this fact, because I just shouted around the room: Are there any Caribbean publications that are non-Jamaicans, and got nothing?).
The media room takes care of us, primarily by ordering many pizzas. At least five times as much pizza as people could eat was ordered. It’s hard to imagine what must have been done with the leftovers. The official word is that all the pizzas were consumed, but I have trouble believing that.
When I returned to the stadium at the night’s end, I saw a slate of mostly empty bleachers filled with trash. It felt like the site of an archeological dig showing traces of a wayward civilization.
I don’t mean for this picture to be misleading: This isn’t a permanent favela. There is a nightly crew that will clean this all up. The photo shows the good that so many people attended to fill the upper stands. But this picture was taken before the meeting was over. On the one hand, the Penn Relays manages to put together the kind of track meet that is one of the most visible events in the country’s sixth most populated city. On the other hand, the sport has a way to go regarding attendance if people aren’t staying through until the end.
Until tomorrow.
