Rule No. 1: No excuses, play like a champion.

OK, so it's actually Rule No. 76, but for the Penn State men's track and field team on Saturday morning, it was absolutely Rule No. 1. The Nittany Lions competed in their first scored meet of the season this weekend at the Multi-Sport Facility with guests Connecticut and Princeton, and played, or rather ran, jumped and threw, like champions.

The men's team locked up the annual tri-meet with 131 points, edging Connecticut by 10 and Princeton by 24. The win was propelled by phenomenal performances from half a dozen or so athletes, including an NCAA provisional qualifying mark met with a new personal best jump from freshman high jumper Ryan Fritz.

In one of the last events of the day, the long-haired jumper cleared 7-1.25 with all his teammates, most already in their street clothes, gathered around rooting him on.

"I knew I had a big jump in me sooner or later," Fritz said, "[Coach] told me to just relax, go into it like it was any other jump."

Right on Fritz's heels, the second-place high jumper was elder Lion Tyler Fedeli, who went over the bar cleanly at 6-9.

The high jump wasn't the only one-two late-in-the-day finish by the Lions on Saturday. Clarence Smith and Ryan Kleintop took the top two spots in the triple jump, breaking the sand at 47-7 and 46-11, respectively.

The triple and high jumps were crucial late events, and secured the win for Head Coach Harry Groves' team.

"The series in this meet has always been close like that," said Groves, who was excited for his jumpers, especially the young Fritz. "What did he get? 7-1? You can just tell he likes what he's doing."

The Lions landed one more one-two punch, this one earlier in the meet. Caleb Hood and Ernie Terrell, who returned from an injury for one race, finished first and second in the 500-meter dash. Hood edged Terrell by six-tenths of a second with a time of 1:04.02.

Other first-place finishes came from Alex Langan, who won the 60-meter dash at 6.94 seconds, and big man Scott Vernon, the first-place finisher in the 35-pound weight throw with a toss of 63-11 on his last of five throws.

With his teammates stoking the fire, Vernon, who already had the longest throw of the day, unleashed one more with a good bellow.

"I knew I won, so I just wanted to put together a good throw and progress towards Big Ten [Championships]," Vernon said. "Having my team there, there's nothing like it. It makes throwing so much more enjoyable."

The Lions had 11 more top-three finishes, including what Assistant Coach Mark Gottdenker called "nice performances in unexpected spots."

Sitting next to him, fellow Assistant Coach Andrew Hardyk was nodding in agreement.

"It was really good for us that it was close," Hardyk said. "I think that every time people got on the line they realized, 'We better do something now.' When it's close like that, any time you don't do what you're supposed to, you can never make up for that. We didn't have any big letdowns, which was really important. If we had, we would not have won."

The meet, scored in a way that, in some events, guaranteed every team at least a few points just for competing, was close all day.

Each of the three teams had the lead at one point. Gottdenker called it "the nature of the beast."

It was a grind. It was a dog fight every event," Gottdenker said.

"Every point in every event was just hard fought."

"The series in this meet has always been close like that," Groves said.

"The main thing, everybody in the meet contributed something. Team effort-wise, it was about as good as you're going to get."