- March 24, 2025
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Dust kicks up onto the wooden bleachers of the arena.
The sound of horses, the clomping of their hooves, and their snorting breath fills the space as they thunder past. The sweet smell of grass and manure wafts through the air.
This isn’t a rodeo. It’s something much rarer, a practice for Sarasota Polo Club’s interscholastic polo team.
Held in the regulation-size polo arena — a 300-foot-by-150-foot dirt field lined with waist-high wooden walls and mesh fencing, Head Coach Stuart Campbell calls out instructions to his team. The four-person team is practicing two-on-two in anticipation for the U.S. Polo Association’s Southeastern Open Preliminary I at the New Bridge Polo and Country Club in Aiken, South Carolina Feb. 7-9.
Polo is a somewhat exclusive sport. The requirements to play are a barrier to most — not only does a player need to have at least two horses, but he or she needs to be a skilled rider and on top of that, a skilled athlete. Polo requires a combination of hand-eye coordination, riding skill and peripheral vision. When thoroughbred horses are thundering by, one wrong move can result in a serious injury.
While intercollegiate polo and adult polo are more established levels of the sport, interscholastic polo for players is less so. That’s why in the summer of 2024, longtime Sarasota Polo Club members Mark and Kate Mulligan came to Campbell, the head pro at the Club, with the idea to start a team.
Their daughter Ainsley Mulligan, a sophomore at the Out-of-Door Academy, has been a horse rider since she was 6 months old. She tried polo for the first time during the pandemic.
Ainsley Mulligan had the passion and competitive spirit that made her a natural. What she didn’t have, however, was a place to play with other youth polo players. She had been forced to play with other adults.
“By creating this team, we opened up opportunities for kids to have kid-on-kid interactions with polo,” Ainsley Mulligan said. “Even though some of the adults that we play with are on the same level as the kids, it’s a different dynamic than playing with other kids our age.”
The team, which plays in arena polo tournaments across the Southeast, consists of Mulligan; Hazel Hill, a 15-year-old who travels from Fort Myers; Jayda Link, a 13-year-old from Sarasota; and Gregory Shepard, a 12-year-old from Lakewood Ranch.
Led by Campbell, the team has progressed over the course of the season, coalescing from disparate adolescents to a cohesive group.
“At the first practice I was wondering what I’d gotten myself into,” Campbell said. “I hate to use the word 'clueless,' but I was pulling my hair out that first day. Their riding skills have improved immensely, however, as well as their ability to work as a team.”
The ability to not only function as a team, but to do so in an arena, were the two biggest challenges the group faced when it started its season in early fall 2024.
Prior to joining the team, most of the players had never played together before, at least not for an extended period of time. At the Polo Club’s practices, teams are often not predetermined and decided on the day by skill set.
“It’s a different experience to practice every week with the same bunch of people,” Kate Mulligan said. “You realize what everybody’s strengths and weaknesses are and you try to work alongside them. One of the things that Stuart emphasizes is your ability to communicate in the moment, calling out to your teammates what the next play will be and where they should go.”
Arena polo is different from that of its traditional counterpart. It's played in teams of three — with one alternate.
A regulation polo field, however, is 300 yards long by 160 yards wide. Prior to joining the team, most of the members had spent the majority of their time playing in the field.
A polo arena is 300-by-150-feet, making for a much more contained, technical game.
“On grass, the game is a lot more open,” Campbell said. “People go for passes and long runs whereas in the arena you’re working behind the action to pick up the scraps, so to speak.”
While the players had to adjust to the arena, the natural tendencies of each player helped to make the transition smoother. There are three positions in arena polo — No. 1, the offensive attack position; No. 2, the pivot position responsible for both attacking and defending; and No. 3, the tactical leader and stronghold of the defense.
Although these positions are somewhat fluid, the two youngest players, Shepard and Link, are the offensive engines of the team.
“Gregory and Jayda can both hit it far and score goals from one side to the other,” Ainsley Mulligan said.
Hill, Ainsley Mulligan said, is great at ride-offs — a maneuver where one player uses their horse to bump an opponent off the line of the ball — and does most of the work to get the ball back in her team's possession. As for herself, Ainsley Mulligan said, she likes to run with the ball and take shots on goal.
More than just the action in the arena, however, is the bond that the players form with one another.
“It’s been so much fun playing with Ainsley, Hazel and Jayda,” said Shepard. “We’re close friends.”
