The News spoke to members of the somewhat unknown Yale Polo Club to explore the history and ongoing operations of one of Yale’s oldest team sports.
Off a roughly beaten track, thirty minutes from campus, you’ll find the Yale Polo and Equestrian Center, or YPEC. A panoramic haven for horse-lovers, the center houses 33 horses across its two barns. Yet, what exactly is Yale Polo, and who participates in this sport?
Yale Polo, according to its website, was established in 1903 and is one of the university’s oldest team sports. “There’s an even longer history to Yale Polo than that, actually, because ROTC students [at Yale] started using horses to play polo as a way to train them for cavalry in the 1870s,” said Mila McKay ’27, the club’s vice-president.
The Yale Armory — constructed adjacent to the Yale Bowl in 1916 for said cavalry training in World War I — was the club’s home base for nearly a century. It shelters its 60 horses and houses an indoor polo arena and intramural playing fields. Yale’s polo players trained and competed at the Armory until its closure in 2009 by the University.
“The students were really good. The men’s team had about 19 championship titles, and in 1969, when Yale began to admit women, polo was one of the only team sports they could fully participate in,” said McKay. “We did lose our varsity status in the 1970s, but then we became [one of] the oldest club sports here at Yale.”
The shuttering of the Armory drove YPEC president, Liz Brayboy ’84, to establish the Yale Polo and Equestrian Center, a non-Yale-affiliated nonprofit organization, in 2009.
Generous donations subsequently enabled the construction of the Yale Polo and Equestrian Center with an indoor polo arena and 15 of the original 60 horses in 2015. YPEC leadership would not disclose the amount of said donations.
“[The center is open] six days a week. We offer polo lessons for middle school, high school and college students, and ‘club truckers’ — sort of friendly pick-up games — on a regular basis,” said Niki Cogliano, the Yale Polo Barn Manager.
According to Cogliano, the center also hosts high school varsity and college games for the Northeast region, which spans from New York to Canada. Yale, a Division II competing Polo University, has played against Cornell, Harvard, UConn, Skidmore, the University of New Hampshire and Georgetown, among other institutions.
Just this past weekend, the Yale team invited HBCU Morehouse College to its center for a monumental match.
Students pay $880 a semester — a highly subsidized membership rate with the help of donations, according to Cogliano and McKay — to train at the center. This cost covers maintenance of the facility and arena as well as horse veterinary care.
For example, Cogliano noted that a teeth cleaning for one horse is approximately $400. With 33 horses to care for, costs mount rapidly.
“There’s a ton of different expenses you don’t necessarily see. The dues that our students pay, which is far lower than the costs you’d find elsewhere, help to offset these [expenditures],” said Cogliano.
Yale Polo Club members specifically train at the center from Tuesday to Friday. Each player chooses certain days to attend practice, and no prior riding experience is required to get started.
McKay says the Yale Polo Club has 45 members, with about 80 percent undergraduates. She added that students are at the intermediate level with six members on the women’s competitive team and five on the men’s.
“We’re really very open to all levels of riding experience — most of our men’s team had never ridden before — and we put you in lessons based on our assessment of your skill-level,” said McKay.
The News spoke to Maya Kulesza ’28 and Vivian Kaleta ’28, two first-time riders and new entries to the Yale Polo Club.
According to both students, new members are introduced to the club through three horsemanship clinics at the start of the fall semester that acquaint prospective riders with the basics of polo and horses.
“After the clinics, we were evaluated on how quickly we picked up [the content] and had a behavioral interview to see how we would fit within the club,” said Kaleta.
McKay further shared that the Yale Polo Club saw a surge in applications this year, with 60 students competing for 15 places. In previous years, the club has seen a maximum of 50 applications.
Once accepted, riders begin their weekly training sessions, each of which is an approximately four-hour-long endeavor.
“It’s a 25-minute drive, after which we’re assigned a horse. We spend about an hour tacking up, [that is] grooming and preparing it. And then we spend about an hour actually riding, followed by a couple of hours of untacking and doing chores,” said Kulesza. “It’s a big time commitment and a little expensive, but it’s definitely been worth it for the team spirit and connections you create.”
Some of the chores include transporting and feeding the horses.
McKay, a first-time rider who joined polo at Yale herself, offered a similar perspective on the value of the sport.
“Yale Polo, at its roots, is about horsemanship and teaching hands-on skills. A lot of people, when they hear polo, they think it’s pretentious, that you’d be socially ostracized if you try to join [the sport] coming from another socioeconomic class [than its usual demographic]. That is completely not the case. It is an expensive sport, but we make it as accessible as possible,” said McKay.
The Yale Polo and Equestrian Center is located at 79 Rainbow Street in Bethany, Connecticut.