12 minute read
South African Goals: Carolina polocrosse players bound for world cup tournament
Mary Kate Murphy
They ride onto their playing field of choice wearing bulky leather knee guards and helmets designed to protect in the event of a racquet to the face as well as an unplanned dismount. But high-level polocrosse players are generally some of the most easygoing elite equestrians you’ll ever meet.
It turns out that you can leave an awful lot of tension on the field in a game that involves making split-second decisions at a flat-out gallop to outmaneuver and outscore the opposing team. The sport is even more intense than it sounds, but Carolina Polocrosse Club members Rahul and Sarah Desai and Kat Liner thrive on it. They’ve gotten so good, in fact, that they’ve all been named to the squad set to represent the United States at the Polocrosse World Cup this summer. Liner’s boyfriend Karl Balogh, a recent transplant from the Sugarloaf Mountain club in Maryland, will also be on the team.
The 2024 Polocrosse World Cup in South Africa this summer will have little in common with international competitions in other disciplines. There are no six- or seven-figure horses involved — and that isn’t just because polocrosse players tend to train their own horses in the sport. Each player on the eight teams represented will ride a borrowed horse sourced from the local area, as is the norm for international polocrosse tournaments.
Polocrosse might be the last truly amateur equestrian sport, still achievable at the highest level to anyone willing to make the effort. Up through the World Cup level the athletes are typically pharmacists and farmers, students and teachers for whom the sport is a hobby and a passion. Rahul and Sarah Desai are both physician’s assistants whose patients and colleagues are vaguely aware that they spend a lot of time playing something kind of like polo.
“People ask us all the time how can I play competitively or how did you guys get there, and I always remind them that everyone started where you are,” said Rahul. “Nobody was born able to do any sport. If you have the dream and are willing to put the work in and seek the right help, there are people who are more than willing to help you. You just have to have the mindset and the desire to do it.”
One of 32 clubs registered with the American Polocrosse Association, Carolina Polocrosse holds practices at least twice a month at the Pinehurst Harness Track. The Desais are based in Greensboro, so it’s a bit of a haul — and that’s just one of the geographic challenges of polocrosse. Active U.S. players number in the hundreds, and they’re scattered all around the country. Only a dozen or so countries have any kind of polocrosse community, so access to top competition requires traveling overseas. In addition to the United States and the host nation of South Africa, teams from Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, Zambia and Zimbabwe will contest this year’s World Cup.
“We burn rubber up and down the highway, that’s for sure. People get hooked on polocrosse pretty easily, but when they find out that the next tournament is six or seven hours away that’s a deterrent,” Rahul says. “Compare that to the likes of Australia, for example, they have in the range of 6 to 8,000 players, maybe 100 at the World Cup level. So it’s a very different playing field.”
Polocrosse has its roots in England where it was developed to teach beginning riders balance and control. It ebbed and waned in popularity around the world in the first part of the 20th century, taking off most notably in Australia in the 1930s. The sport might be most accurately described as mounted lacrosse, and it requires a similar skillset to polo. It also shares some terminology with that better-known relative: each match is divided into six-minute periods called “chukkas.”
As polo’s younger cousin, though, polocrosse is the egalitarian, athletic, beer drinker of the two. In polocrosse, the six players on the field at a time are confined to a 160-by-60 yard area one- fifth the size of a standard polo field. So not only is the action easier to watch, there’s more of it and it happens more quickly. Where polo players utilize a string of ponies for each match, polocrosse players are typically limited to one mount per game. Substitutions are occasionally allowed in the event of a horse injury.
Both Desais, Liner and Balogh played on the national team for the 2019 World Cup in Australia. They’re among about 15 players in the United States rated at the top of the one-to-10 scale used to gauge players’ ability. Based on ball skills, horsemanship and use of strategy in play, riders rated at 9 or 10 are considered to be reliably competitive at the “A” grade of play. Megan Swift and Braxton Hamlin of the Tennessee Valley Polocrosse Club and Lone Star teammates Dori Johnson and Houston Hutcherson will round out the eight-member World Cup team. Swift and Hamlin are also returning to the squad from the 2019 team, which finished the tournament at the bottom of the pack.
“Last time we were just kind of thrown into it because a lot of our team was pretty new,” Liner recalled. “The biggest thing we took away from it is we’re so much slower than other countries. They were so quick to get to the ball and convert it really well so that’s something we’ve been working on the last couple of years.” heading up the American Polocrosse Association’s World Cup committee. Balogh also learned to play at a young age from his parents and older brothers.
As teenagers, both were selected by the American Polocrosse Association to participate in competitive tours and player exchanges internationally. Even as an individual, to play polocrosse is will bring an additional four years of experience and rapport to the field in South Africa. “Now that we’ve kind of all been playing together for four-ish years I think we’re definitely playing a lot better polocrosse with each other now, so it will be cool to see how we pull together for this World Cup coming up.”
Ball skills and strategy are only one facet of polocrosse, though. For the Americans, essentially catch-riding through the most demanding competition they’ve ever faced is another.
“We learned that we were much closer than we thought we were in terms of being able to compete at that level, because all of our games were very close. Most of them were games we were leading and didn’t maintain it. Part of our job this time around will be making sure we keep the momentum,” Sarah said. “We learned that horse management is very important, trying to find the right combination of riders and horses. It’s a really delicate art which I don’t think we were very skilled at last time.
It’s not that they were new to international competition: polocrosse offers more opportunities than most sports for young talent to play abroad. Liner picked up the sport at Muddy Creek Farm, just down the road from her childhood home in Whispering Pines. So did her family. Her parents and brother play, and her dad Wade is to be a member of a global support network. If you have the time and a plane ticket, someone will find you a bed to sleep in and horse to ride when you get there.
“We went on a lot of these youth tours. We’ve been to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and being able to travel you make friends all over the world playing competitive polocrosse,” said Balogh, who with the other five returning World Cup team members
South Africa will provide more than 100 horses for the World Cup: 12 for each of the eight teams as well as reserve horses. Horses are rated and grouped into nine “pools” of roughly similar capability. Each team, including the host country, will be assigned a pool at random on July 16, four days before the first games of the tournament. Teams will have about an hour each day for four days to evaluate their pool and get a sense of how those 12 horses match up with their eight riders based on riding style and which positions they play best. In polocrosse, each team’s No.1 player is the only one permitted to score. The No. 3 player is restricted to the defensive position near the goalposts, and the No. 2 players are midfielders.
“There are players that are phenomenal and clearly better than others, but when you make it to a World Cup the gap in skill level is quite narrow,” said Rahul. “When you pair it up with the horse power and the coaching to match the right player with the right horse, that can prove to be the difference maker moreso than the skill level of the players.”
Enhancing that skill in a sport that demands a particularly high level of athletic training has to fall in line with full-time jobs and other commitments. Having significant others in the game just makes it all manageable. Liner graduated from The University of North Carolina a few years ago and works as an echo tech at Moore Regional Hospital while applying to physician’s assistant school.
“Usually something kind of goes by the wayside and recently it’s been sleep,” she said. “Balancing applications and work it definitely is a lot, but it’s so hard to quit. It is super helpful having Karl to help and motivate me to go out and ride, especially on days after work when I want nothing less than to go out in the heat and tack up.”
For the Desais, teamwork on the polocrosse field extends to what might be an even more hectic day-to-day of managing careers in medicine, eight horses at home, and their two young sons Krish and Kiren. Working out and riding usually bookend 12-hour shifts in a schedule that starts at 5 a.m.
“It’s more of an understanding of the requirements and the sacrifice we have to make, that level of understanding of what each other is going through. At the end of the day I’m holding myself accountable and the team is relying on me,” Rahul said. “When you’re out there, even though it’s only six minutes at a time, it’s flat out gallops most of the time while trying to focus on the ball. Add the slightest bit of physical or mental fatigue with distraction and before you know it you’re performing at 70 percent of your peak.”
“We can push each other. When I’ve been working all day and I’ve got to cook dinner and get them to bed, it’s hard for me to say I’m going to do a Peloton workout or work on my racquet work,” Sarah added. “The kids also like to play, they enjoy the traveling, so they come and they know everybody at the tournament, Krish was 15 months old when we took him to the last World Cup. There’s no resentment about the time that we’re having to spend because we all do it together.”
The Desais keep their five active polocrosse horses at home along with two young prospects and their kids’ pony. The mix includes a few Thoroughbreds —15 hands, please, Sarah says — a Quarter Horse, and two Australian
Stock Horse/Thoroughbred crosses. They’ve developed their own horses in a process that takes about three years from green broke to their first chukka in a high-level game. Breed, Rahul says, is less important than “athleticism and a brain,” and the willingness to work hard.
“At the end of the day if the horse is not having fun, it’s just not a good combination,” he said. “We luckily have some that if you just look at them when they get near the field you can tell they really love to play. One would run up to the barn if you turn on the clippers and stand there waiting to have his mane clipped because he knew what that meant.”
Sarah comes from a dressage and eventing background, but she also competed in tetrathlons – combining running, shooting, swimming and riding — before she discovered polocrosse through Pony Club.
“A lot of people will probably tell you that our standards are much higher than the average polocrosse player,” she said. “I don’t want to fight my horse, I don’t want my horse running around with his head in the air. I expect a certain level of responsiveness. It takes about two years once they’re able to get on the field to where we’re really happy with where they are.”
Rahul was born in South Africa and grew up in Zimbabwe, where he learned the sport before his family emigrated to the United States. The chance to play in a World Cup together in his homeland has motivated the couple since the last World Cup in Australia.
“After the 2019 World Cup we had some decisions to make: we were fortunate that we’re still competing at the top level in the US,” Rahul said. “The commitment to playing in the World Cup is such a big task. It’’s probably the last time that both of us will be able to be on it together and the fact that it’s in South Africa is a nice icing on the cake. I still have family there and take every opportunity to go back home.”
The United States is scheduled to play defending champions Australia, as well as Zambia and the United Kingdom, in the first three days of the World Cup tournament at the Durban Shongweni Club in KwaZulu-Natal. New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Ireland and South Africa will play in another pool. Teams will be ranked within their pools based on the first three days of play, and those rankings will determine the next three days of matches leading up to the July 28 championship game.
“My biggest goal is to leave everything on the field,” said Liner. “I would hate to be on the flight home wishing I’d gone after the ball a little harder.”
