9 minute read
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 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 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
Left Harvard men v Yale at Jack Wills Varsity tournament, Guard’s Polo Club, UK, 2011. Below UVA men v Westmont in finals of the USPA Intercollegiates, 2012 Right University of Pennsylvania’s Meredith Shea at the USPA mid-state regional tournament in Ohio, 2012
USPA has set aside $30,000 annually for ‘start-up and enhancement’ grants of $2,000 each. But institutions don’t create polo teams, students do.
The University of Pennsylvania is another newcomer to the college polo scene. Meredith Shea, a junior, started the team in December 2010, during her second year. Local polo hero Lezlie Hiner, whose Work to Ride programme coached Polo Training Foundation’s 2011 Male Interscholastic Player of the year Kareem Rosser, and won the 2011 Interscholastic championship, agreed to coach the team. Shea posted fliers on campus and organised training sessions for the new recruits. But while the young Penn teams practise in Hiner’s barn in Fairmount Park, they travel farther for four chukkas of polo than most of us would for a family reunion.
‘There’s been a lot of travelling,’ Shea said, ‘because we don’t have the capacity to host.’ This season, the team travelled for games against Vassar (3h15, one way), Yale (3h30), and the University of Massachusetts (5h15). At the USPA mid-state regional tournament held near Cincinnati (9h50) this March, Penn got its first win.
Ituarte, Shea and their counterparts at Brown (polo team founded 2011), Idaho (2005), and Vassar (2001), are resurrecting a college polo tradition that is more than 100 years old. Strategic connections make the sport possible, in the form of alumni support, institutional grants and local club collaboration. But there is no template for success, and the sport’s oldest teams, like its newest, have had to seek new and innovative support systems.
The first formal, American college polo game was played in 1907, when Harvard met Yale at the Myopia Polo Club, 30 miles north of Boston. The teams played there again last fall, but this is no annual ritual. While both of these colleges, with their reputation for catering to the American aristocracy, seem like the perfect staging grounds for polo, each has struggled mightily to keep its team afloat. Harvard’s current iteration is only six years old; Yale’s team is the oldest in the country but as I wrote in the spring issue of Hurlingham, it narrowly survived a recent crisis.
These universities once boasted some of the best polo teams in the country. Yale taught and trained Harry Payne Whitney and Winston Guest, men credited with putting an American stamp on the game. In the Twenties and Thirties, the national title always went either to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell or West Point. But after World War II, with the termination of the US Cavalry programme, part of polo’s institutional foundation vanished. The Reserve Officer Training Corps had used polo to train officers at many American universities, and the death of that tradition put college polo in a bad way. By the early Seventies, there were only six men’s teams remaining.
But a new model, if it can be called that, was emerging. In 1952, a group of students and faculty members at the University of Virginia founded a polo team that operated with total financial independence from the school. Playing on what had been a cornfield near Charlottesville, the team ran on student dues and donations. The horses came from the students themselves and from benefactors. By the Sixties, the team
Yale 2011-12 men and women’s polo teams
was consistently finishing in the top three of a shrinking field of college polo teams.
Duncan Huyler, the USPA committee chairman for I/I, thinks Virginia’s model is about as good, and as stable, as it gets. ‘The ideal is some form of alumni support,’ he told me. ‘Schools like UVA – they have an indoor arena, outdoor arena, 70
horses, all paid for by alumni and student dues, with no help from the university – that’s as close to an ideal as you can come.’
One of Huyler’s goals as I/I committee chairman is to double the number of teams by 2020. ‘We want to take clubs that haven’t been involved in high school or college polo and get them involved,’ Huyler said. ‘Or college teams that don’t have high school programmes; high school teams that don’t have colleges.’ The sport’s limiting factors are horses and places to play, so by making the most of those resources, the USPA can encourage as much polo as possible.
Alumni support is crucial, too. The actor Tommy Lee Jones, for example, is a great benefactor of the Harvard team, and hosts players at his Texas ranch each summer. At Yale, I found that the returning graduates of a Saturday afternoon Yale Polo alumni day were mostly young, and unlike many alumni events, came not only to reminisce, drink Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and hopefully donate to the programme, but also to get on horseback and play.
Like many teams unlikely to compete for the national championship – Yale’s last was more than 20 years ago – Yale Polo has a low barrier to entry. Polo has always struggled with an elitist reputation and college polo, particularly its less competitive teams, may be its most democratic incarnation.
Crocker Snow, who coaches the Harvard team, estimates that what students pay in dues at Harvard cover about a quarter of the operating costs. Yale’s dues for varsity players can run to over a thousand dollars a year, but that is not much more than the dues for certain campus sororities or fraternities. And it is a tiny fraction of what polo costs in the real world. This is the reality that has dawned on Yale’s recent graduates, and also those from all of the country’s college polo programmes who graduate with an addiction to polo and no polo family to come home to.
‘That’s why this sport is so important to us,’ said Bobby Isakson, an Alabama native who plays for SMU. ‘It could be 10 or 20 years before we’re able to afford to play again.’
Huyler and the USPA are trying to decrease the waiting time, during which other, more accessible hobbies might supplant polo. ‘We’ve got to get the kids back into the game,’ Huyler said. ‘A lot of kids don’t come back. It’s time-consuming, it’s expensive – but you understand what a rush it is. If you like the sport it’s the best thing there is. How do we keep the kids in the game?’ The USPA tries to keep recent graduates on membership rolls, and bring them back to umpire games and coach starter teams. Alumni events like Yale’s are part of that, too. But whether these polo newcomers become polo lifers is largely out of their hands.
‘Our coach likes to say it’s a narcotic sport,’ said Nuñez, who had never played before coming to Harvard but has spent summers on Tommy Lee Jones’s ranch. ‘Once you get to a certain point, it’s something you can’t imagine yourself not doing.’
‘That’s my number one reason for working hard,’ added Elizabeth Lebow, a sophomore at Cornell who transferred from Kentucky to play polo. ‘To support my polo habit.’
