Polo Team, 1920s
For those of you unfamiliar with the game of polo, here’s a quick primer before we get into OSU’s connection to the sport: Four players mounted on horses and equipped with long mallets try to drive a wooden ball down a field and across the other team’s goal line. Meanwhile, four players on the opposite team try to get the ball away from the first team and do the same thing. Each player has at least three horses that can be rotated in and out of play, according to certain rules. It is considered a full-contact sport, and falls, bumps and spills are part of the game. For a good idea of how it all works, read Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “The Maltese Cat.”
As to Ohio State: In the mid-1920s, Lt. Charles Horn organized the first polo team, using artillery horses owned by the U.S. Army. In 1927, 40 horses were transferred with polo equipment for use by the OSU’s ROTC program. What does the military have to do with polo? For many years, the military regarded polo as an ideal training method for officers. Many ROTC programs, as well as military bases, had horses and polo teams on hand; in fact, polo was a sport spread by the military, first by the British and then in the U.S.
Polo Team, 1942 (Charles Horn kneeling on far right)
Here at OSU, many of the men on the polo team were enrolled in the ROTC program, but many were also studying Veterinary Medicine; there were also some who got into the sport without wanting to be a vet of either variety.
By all accounts, polo’s heyday was the interwar era. At OSU, crowds of up to 1,000 would gather to watch games played at the polo fields south of Ohio Stadium and east of the Olentangy River. An additional field was near the site of the Fawcett Center, and the stable where the horses were housed stood near the corner of Lane Avenue and Olentangy River Road.
Polo game, 1929
As the military provided the horses, there was actually very little cost to the players except for riding attire and travel expenses for away games. That is how OSU could afford to compete with the likes of Princeton, Harvard and Yale, as well as travel to the games. (The horses did not travel with the team; the home team would provide horses for the visitors.) In addition to competing against Ivy League teams, OSU also played teams closer to home, such as Michigan State. The Buckeyes also competed against the University of Missouri, Texas A&M and a number of military teams.
Polo ceased to be played at OSU in 1943, when the U.S. Army recalled its horses.
After World War II, the resulting influx of war veterans and others seeking an affordable higher education nearly overwhelmed OSU’s original Columbus campus. So University officials sought a different way to serve these students that wasn’t exclusively in its campus classrooms.
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