Grad students make time for sport they love

Believe it or not, you can play polo at WSU without ever before having ridden a horse. That’s what architecture master’s degree student Sean Beatty did three years ago, and he’s now a seasoned member of the WSU horse polo sport club.

Attitude is more important than experience to get started and stick with the game, he said.

“This is not a sport that will necessarily be mastered easily; therefore, a lot of practice and devotion are involved.”

Also, for a busy graduate student, it requires some forethought.

“The key is planning ahead and managing my time effectively,” Beatty said. “I don’t watch too much TV.”

There’s no time for TV. Club members typically practice four or five nights a week, from 7 p.m. to midnight, at Lucky Acres arena in Lewiston, Idaho, said undergraduate member Abbey Jorstad. The team competes November through March against regional teams from Washington, Oregon and Montana colleges and universities.

The first game of the season, usually sometime in November, will be advertised on campus once it is scheduled, said president and undergraduate student Seth Alcott.

The team is comprised of 15-20 members, from beginner to expert. Very few have their own horses. The club owns and boards horses at Lucky Acres for the team to use.

Club dues are $250 per semester, “which sure beats boarding your own horse on the Palouse for that amount per month,” Alcott said. Members also are required to join the U.S. Polo Association, which costs $35 per year.

Horse sports aren’t cheap, but polo proved a bargain for first-year veterinary student Ashley Alger — it kept her in college.

“I was so homesick,” she remembers of her freshman year at WSU. She had grown up riding, and loving, horses and planned to be a veterinarian. But she was considering leaving WSU until she heard about the polo club.

“Polo gave me the opportunity to become part of a tight-knit group of wonderful people,” she said. “It kept me in school.”

And it keeps her on track academically as she pursues year five (her first in vet school) at WSU: “It is never a question of ‘when am I going to get my homework done,’ but ‘if I get this done …, I can go play polo,’ “ she said. “Polo is a reward for me. It keeps me sane.”

For more information on the club, contact horsepolo@wsu.edu.

Club Hoppin’ is an occasional series of articles about some of the lesser-known of the 25 clubs in the WSU Sport Club Federation. Faculty and staff are welcome to participate, though in some sports competition is restricted to students only.

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