Polocrosse Comes to Alaska and Hawaii
By Sally Batton with Lucretia Witte Sally Batton is the Founder of Athletic Equestrian which includes the Athletic Equestrian League, Athletic Equestrian Clinics and the Athletic Equestrian Riding in College Podcasts. She was the Head Coach of the Dartmouth College Varsity Equestrian Team for 30 years and currently teaches clinics to Pony Clubs and community members in Alaska, Hawaii and all around the US. Her book The Athletic Equestrian will be published in January 2022.
The explosion of cheers at one end of the field told me that the first goal of the game had been scored. As the riders trotted back toward me, their happy chortles and congratulations mingled with the sound of seabirds and the lapping waves. We were in Homer, Alaska, putting together days’ worth of clinic work into our final game. The hoofprints of the horses left divots in the sand of the Homer Spit at low tide and the peaks of Mt. Redoubt and Mt. Augustine soared high over Kachemak Bay. Here in Alaska, Polocrosse thrives, on the opposite side of the world from its beginnings in Australia. The sport, developed in 1938 by a horse-loving husband and wife in Sydney, has expanded most prominently to other Australian clubs, South Africa and the UK. Back in my college days at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, a group of students took their term abroad in Australia and returned home in love with the game, putting Painesville on the map as one of the first places Polocrosse was played in the US. Most of them lived in my dorm,
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