Thanks to a second week of inclement weather in a row, the Penn State men's track and field team spent much of its meet under, rather than in, historic Franklin Field in Philadelphia.

Saturday's Penn Invitational was dominated by high winds and on-and-off rain, forcing most of the athletes to either warm up indoors and compete in the awful, end-of-the-world type weather, or completely withdraw from competition.

Penn State head coach Harry Groves, who has certainly seen his share of miserable meet conditions and spent much of the day in a makeshift trash-bag raincoat, called it one of his worst.

"They got about 20 minutes behind [schedule], and the longer you were out there the worse it got," he said. "So most people went inside to get warmed up, and of course you could do it under the stands, too."

Most of the events went off without many problems, but some were completely altered.

"The throws were extremely bad," Groves said. "They had the discus, but it was too dangerous, so we didn't even throw. It was one of those days."

In the team's only throwing event of the day, senior Scott Vernon launched the hammer throw more than 120 feet to beat the field by three or four paces.

The Nittany Lions won five other events, including Ryan Fritz's and Tyler Fedeli's 6-8.25 tie atop the high jump, which, like the pole vault and triple jump, had to be moved indoors.

Junior Ryan Kleintop won the day's only outdoor jump, the long jump, with a leap of 21-10.75.

Penn State won the two shortest races of the day.

Seniors Alex Langan and Steve Morgan won the 100- and 200-meter dashes, respectively. Langan was the only runner to break 11 seconds in the whipping rain.

Ron Jules splashed his way to a win in the 110-meter hurdles, running in 14.7 seconds.

The 4x800-meter relay team of Michael Syrnick, Dan Michael, Tim Johnson and Michael Malazia edged second-place Penn by less than two seconds at 7:50.47.

Kyle Berseth didn't win his event, but Groves was thrilled with the senior's personal record 9:42.2 in the 3000-meter steeplechase, a time 19 seconds faster than his previous best.

"The weather was less than ideal for this time of the season, so it didn't really help," Berseth said. "I'm pretty happy with it because at our first meet, there was terrible winds. So there haven't been great conditions yet. I think it still went pretty well."

The meet wasn't scored, which might have prompted most of the competing schools to withdraw from the outside events.

"The two top teams, as far as what took place, were us and Cornell," Groves said. "If it had been scored, both of us would've entered differently.

"With 15 to 20 teams in there, you had plenty of competition regardless. The people who dropped out probably weren't too tough. It was a make-do type of day, and competitively it was a great meet. Everyone who did compete had to be tough as nails."