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CAP, GOWN AND MALLET US college polo has seen its fortunes wax and wane. But, asks Henry Grabar Sage, could a renaissance be on the way? The crowd at the Oxley Equestrian Center in Ithaca, New York has started to cheer. After a dismal first chukka, in which the University of Virginia (UVA) outscored the home team Cornell Big Red 8-0, the teams have switched horses. With both teams riding Cornell ponies, a sort of home-field advantage kicks in, and Cornell knock in two goals unanswered. The crowd of over a hundred, starts yelling and clapping. A chant of ‘Go Big Red’, rises from the bleachers. But the euphoria is short-lived. The Cavaliers find their footing and ride to a 29-12 victory, and a spot in the men’s finals on Sunday. There are some impressive highlights – Mauricio Lopez’s volley for the 13th goal in particular – but Virginia’s strength is their efficiency. Counterattacking, in particular, they are fast and they do not miss chances. I watched the game with Texas A&M coach Mike McCleary, who has won national championships with three different schools over 40 years. ‘This is the roots of it,’ McCleary said, looking on as the Cavaliers concluded their display. ‘Everybody’s always saying, what good is the I/I? What does it do for polo?’ Interscholastic/ Intercollegiate polo, or I/I, is the United States Polo Association’s (USPA) department for high school and college polo programmes. ‘If we don’t
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back our youth players,’ McCleary concluded sombrely, ‘the sport will die.’ He and many others think the future of polo in this country depends upon the success of college programmes like these. We are in the midst of a college polo renaissance: the number of college programmes has grown from six men’s teams in 1973 to 62 programmes today, 38 of which are women’s teams. College polo has been instrumental in getting women into the game. But according to the USPA, despite the boom in college play, the number of people playing polo in America has hardly changed. You might think, from the numbers, that polo is becoming a fixture at American universities. Nearly 1,000 kids compete every year in high school and college polo. But creating and sustaining a polo team is expensive and only a few American schools have teams that can compete at the highest level. Of the five dozen college polo teams in existence today, only the top tier can boast of having their own horses and their own arena. Fewer still have what can be called a fan base and only a handful have won a national championship. Diego Nuñez, a Harvard senior on the polo team, expressed a widely held view that there is a divide in college polo. ‘There are two tiers, in my mind,’ Nuñez told me. ‘Schools who can recruit and
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who can compete on an intercollegiate level, and kids who learn as much as they can in four years.’ In terms of the sport’s growth, the lower level is the more dynamic. A recent success story is Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) programme, which SMU undergrad Enrique Ituarte started three years ago. Ituarte is from Mexico, but attended boarding school at Indiana’s Culver Military Academy. Culver is the most historically successful team in scholastic polo, the level beneath college polo. Ituarte went to the national championship four times with Culver, and lost each time. As a freshman at SMU, Ituarte convinced Culver coach Tom Goodspeed to join him in Dallas. With Ituarte’s vision, and his family’s generosity in supplying horses, Ituarte and Goodspeed started the school polo team. Three years later, helped by the play of former Culver polo team captain and SMU sophomore August Scherer, they had arrived at Cornell, competing in the national championship tournament. A first-round loss did not lessen the achievement. The story is unusual only in that the team found success so quickly. The closest thing to a constant in the development of a college polo team is that it depends on the commitment of one or two people. Universities provide ‘club sports’ funding – usually a few thousand dollars – and the
