Come spring, some students may have a new reason to pop their collars - the founding of the first Brown University Polo Club. Adam Crego '09, Nina Frost '09 and Rachel Griffith '10 are working to form an intercollegiate polo club that they hope, with enough support, will become official next year.
Polo, a fast-paced game played on horseback, has four players per team. The goal is to hit a metal ball into the other team's goal using a mallet. An outdoor polo field is the size of approximately nine American football fields, Frost said.
"I've never played polo before," Crego said. "I wanted to try something different. At Brown you definitely have the opportunity to try something you've never done before, and I've always wanted to play."
Frost started playing polo in high school and is currently playing at a polo club in France, where she is spending the semester studying abroad. "I always entertained the idea of playing polo at Brown, but I never found anyone who had more than a halfway interest in the sport," she said. "I got very lucky that Adam was also interested, so we've been trying to form the club."
If approved, the Brown team would compete against other clubs including those of Harvard, Cornell and Yale. The Yale club was founded in the 1920s as a way to train cavalry officers.
Forming a club, however, is no easy task. "We've talked to people at the Newport Polo Club, and we're talking to the assistant athletic director (at Brown)," Griffith said. "We need to write a constitution, write a budget and write basically a mission statement. Then we will go to people higher up and try to convince them."
The Newport Polo Club, about a 35-minute drive from campus, would provide practice space and lessons for club members. "In the U.S., polo essentially originated in Newport - another reason why Brown should get on this," Frost said.
"Newport is really nice because we have all the resources to do this through them," Crego said. "At other schools, we would have to build the barn, go buy horses and do a lot of things that Newport already has."
Dan Keating, the founder and president of the Newport Polo Club, said that no prior polo or horsemanship experience is necessary in order to play, though any familiarity with the sport is beneficial. "We're used to people who don't have much riding experience, but that have good hand-eye coordination and love sports," he said.
Keating said his club would offer lessons for $50, including horse and equipment rental. Lessons would incorporate basic horsemanship, riding, hitting drills and scrimmaging, Keating said.
"Right now, I guess we're just focusing on funding from the University, persuading Brown to give us money for lessons, which are actually quite reasonable (in terms of price)," Frost said.
Funding is currently the greatest obstacle for the potential polo team. "We're hoping at this point Brown will decide to give us some money," Crego said. "We're really hoping some alumni will decide to help us start this."
Frost said, "Having Newport there already established - that means we need less money to play than Harvard or Yale."
Recreation Coordinator Kristofer Newsome said the athletics department is supportive of the creation of new clubs, but it does not currently have the funding to add more sports. "If we get the funding we will make the sport, but if we don't get the funding it won't be easy to make the team a reality," he said.
The club would not need many people to compete and already has 12 interested students, Crego said. The club would have co-ed practices, but men and women would compete separately, he added.
Griffith said they are looking for interested students to get experience this spring, before a club is made official, through lessons at the Newport Polo Club. "We need to show Brown there is an interest in a polo team," she said. "We're trying to get approval this spring so we can start next fall," she added.
Polo is often stereotyped as a sport only for the wealthy. "People think you have a lot of people riding around on horses and players sipping tea in between matches and audiences clapping in their white gloves," Frost said. "Polo players are athletes and shy away from those audiences."
"People have a misguided perception to what polo is, but we're hoping to change their minds," Frost added.
Keating encouraged new riders to take on this challenging sport. "If you're not a super-athlete with commitment already in something else, this is a great way to engage in a sport where everyone will be donning up at the same level," Keating said.
