Riding high

One evening in March 1890, a dinner party took place in New York that launched the Polo Association – now known as the United States Polo Association (USPA). In attendance were several notable fgures, including HL Herbert, John Cowdin and Thomas Hitchcock. By June, seven clubs had joined the association, and its formation marked the founding of the second- oldest national governing body of sport in America, second only to the United States Tennis Association established in 1881.

Today, 125 years on, the USPA is thriving. During its early lifetime it relied on dedicated individuals – mostly volunteers – to keep it going. Thanks to the advent of the US Polo Assn. brand – products offcially sanctioned by the USPA, which are licensed in more than 135 countries – the association now has an annual budget of more than $10m. Around 21 per cent of this fgure is channelled into umpiring, 14 per cent on marketing – including a frst-time deal with network television – 33 per cent on polo development and 33 per cent on services; and the sport is feeling the beneft.

‘We are looking to grow awareness of the sport,’ says Peter Rizzo, CEO of the organisation. ‘The USPA has weathered some big storms, but membership is at an all-time high [some 5,000 people are currently enrolled], even after surviving a depression. However, polo is diffcult to promote and it’s going to take time, repetition and more repetition.’

Rizzo came on board 12 years ago, when the USPA had a more challenging budget of around $1m, made up of membership and club fees, plus tournament and marketing revenue. ‘If we wanted to do something then, we needed to fnd the money,’ he says. ‘The switch-over began in 2004. As income grew, the USPA embarked on a strategic planning programme. We thought, “We’re going to be getting some money, so what should we do with it?”’

In 2003, the company’s then-CEO David Cummings moved over to run USPA Properties, Inc., which manages the US Polo Assn. brand. He faced a couple of critical hurdles. ‘We were able to enter into a settlement with Polo Ralph Lauren, which was trying to stop us using the name US Polo Association because it had the word ‘polo‘ registered,’ he says. ‘We were able to carve out how we could both exist.’

A second litigious obstacle was overcome in 2005, when a jury was presented with four proposed logos of mounted horsemen and found three out of four of them different enough from Polo Ralph Lauren to be used. Cummings then brought in expertise from the American clothing industry to create the brand’s DNA, and things began to fourish. ‘With a little skill, luck and determination, we’ve been able to build quite a successful programme,’ he says.

The mission of USPA Properties, Inc. is, according to Cummings, ‘to make money for the USPA, and to create a long-term source of revenue through a sports-licensing programme’. Charles Weaver, current chairman of the USPA, is ensuring the funds won’t be wasted. ‘We’ve established our goal of having our endowment fully funded by 2022,’ he says. ‘That will run our current programmes into perpetuity.’

Thankfully, the future success of the game is built on frm foundations. Polo was brought to America from Britain by James Gordon Bennett in 1876 – although, as Horace A Laffaye explains in his book Polo in the United States: A History, it was Hermann Oelrichs, the American agent for the North German Lloyd shipping line, who, when visiting England, brought back the right equipment with which to play the game.

Initially, the sport lacked stipulations. It was the USPA – located in New York, the centre of polo at the time – that introduced rules, limited pony size to 14.1 hands and decreed the ball should be made of basswood. HL Herbert was the frst chairman and held the position for 31 years, during which time he introduced the

Previous pages The USPA-backed USA team ride out at the FIP World Championship. Opposite, from left A USPA campaign image, featuring Herndon Radclif; the team in Chile. This page, from top A Dufers match in Newport, 1890s; the frst USPA chairman, HL Herbert

handicap system, as well as a set of US rules.

In the 1950s, the USPA became an offcial corporation with a mission statement. ‘The United States Polo Association was organised and exists for the purposes of promoting the game of polo,’ it read, ‘coordinating the activities of its member clubs and registered players, arranging and supervising polo tournaments, competitions and games and providing rules, handicaps and conditions for those tournaments, competitions and games, including the safety and welfare of participants and mounts.’

Rizzo is passionate about the fnal part of the statement. ‘In all that promotion and all that revenue, the most important thing is the welfare of the horses,’ he says. He cites the player-steed relationship as key in promoting polo and wants to see an increase in the number of players who own their own mounts. ‘That’s the challenge – I’ve asked the clubs to come up with ways to make that happen,’ he says.

New funds have given life to programmes that aim to fulfl the opening sentiment of the original mission statement by strengthening the pool of home-grown players. Kris Bowman, who, like Rizzo, was a former USPA volunteer, played a key part in the strategic planning in anticipation of the success of USPA Properties, Inc. and the US Polo Assn. brand.

‘Coming from the days when volunteers ran the association to having the staff and the funds to enable us to achieve our goals is an enormous

milestone,’ she says. ‘When I was chairman of the club and membership committee in 2000, we had no money to support our projects and the volunteers got together twice a year to talk about what we would “like” to do if we had the time or the money.’

One of Bowman’s leading initiatives is the Team USPA programme – something she envisioned creating as a volunteer with the Polo Training Foundation, a non-proft organisation formed to help build the sport at grass-roots level. ‘Sadly, we didn’t have the funding to get it off the ground back then,’ she says. ‘But with the support of Peter Rizzo, Tom Biddle and the USPA Board of Governors, Charles Smith [volunteer chairman of Polo Development LLC] and I were able to secure the funding to launch the project in 2010. We created this programme in response to the need for higher-rated, young American players.’ It has made its mark. Team USPA players made up the American team at the FIP World Championship, and were well represented in 20-goal play this year, as well as appearing in the winning teams of 75 per cent of 12- and 14-goal USPA tournaments in 2014.

Polo Development LLC is one of a group of LLCs formed in recent years to structure the USPA for today and the future. ‘As our programmes grew, we felt it was best to protect our assets in the form of LLCs,’ says Bowman. Consequently, each division has a small board and an executive director to focus on their speciality areas and assist in the integration of LLC budgets and the overall mission. More than 25 programmes exist, focusing on the growth and development of polo, and are broken

Opposite David Cummings, CEO of USPA Properties, Inc This page, from top US Polo Assn in Bangalore, India; polo shirts by the brand

into three divisions: Club Development, Player Development and Interscholastic/Intercollegiate. These encompass club consulting, adult and junior clinics, youth tournaments, scholarship and grant programmes and a new certifed polo-instructor scheme.

The Services department, which supports all other sections of the LLCs and is referred to as the ‘mother ship’, is made up of the rules, governance, handicapping, disciplinary and international tournaments committees, as well as various supporting groups. The department is led by Rizzo and executive director Bob Puetz, together with the Executive Committee – an elected volunteer-leadership group.

Polo Development is the largest LLC run by Bowman and her staff. ‘We’ve made a big impact on the sport over the past fve years,’ she says. ‘We’re often referred to as “the point of the spear”. They are also a cog in the system. ‘My conversation with our marketing department,’ says Weaver, ‘is to focus on their job to drive people to our Polo Development LLC, and the Polo Development LLC’s job is to get those people on horseback.’ Charlie Muldoon is executive director of the Umpire LLC. ‘He has put the “p” in professionalism in the umpire programme,’ says Bowman.

USPA’s president, Joe Meyer, has been heavily involved in the marketing programmes at the USPA and believes the deal with NBC Sports is crucial. ‘If people see it on TV, they view it as a real sport,’ he says. ‘We observed that in soccer, and in other sports, too. They’ve got to feel they belong to something important – then they can get excited about it.’

The USPA has changed dramatically over the past decade and it plans to continue to grow. ‘It’s been an incredible experience to be able to work on organisational and corporate change because of the manner in which our budget has evolved,’ says Weaver. ‘It adds complexity to our organisation, but it’s also given us greater opportunities to give back to the sport.’