News

Wyo Polo Match Brings Top Players

By ERIC SCHMOLDT
Star-Tribune staff writer
Friday, August 15, 2008 2:06 AM MDT

There won't be a better match in Wyoming all year.

In fact, Sunday's contest may be the highest quality polo match in the entire United States this summer.

And you don't have to be Edward Lewis or Vivian Ward to see it.

"Polo gets the reputation of being a rich-man's sport and people think of Pretty Woman, the movie," said Roger Bent, executive director of the Downtown Sheridan Association. "There'll be some extremely high-society, wealthy people out there, but you won't be able to pick them out."

But they'll be there with good reason.

The second annual Goose Creek Benefit Cup exhibition match takes place Sunday at the Flying H Polo Club in Big Horn and will feature some of the top polo players in the world.

"It'll be all professionals, whereas the matches (here usually) have two pros and two sponsors on each side," said Boone Stribling, polo director at Flying H. "It'll be an all-pro game so it'll be a lot faster and there won't be so many balls or goals missed."

A typical match at Flying H -- which hosts high-goal polo matches for six weeks during July and August -- is a 15- to 20-goal contest, a number that is determined by adding the handicaps of the players on each team.

The highest possible handicap is a 10, which means the players in normal matches average a handicap of about four. The Goose Creek Cup will be a 27- or 28-goal game, meaning the average player involved is a seven handicap.

"This time of the year, (fans) won't see any polo like this around the country," Stribling said. "This will be the highest-played match this summer, to my knowledge, in the United States.

"In the winter time, down in Florida, that's where all the best players will be playing and they have a few exhibition matches that might be a little higher level than this game. But in the summertime, there's no 27- or 28-goal polo around that I'm aware of."

Last year, the Flying H sought out a private nonprofit to be a beneficiary of a polo game that would raise awareness of polo for the community.

And despite only about a month to work with, Flying H chose the Downtown Sheridan Association and they worked in conjunction to create an event that did more than accomplish the original goal.

The Goose Creek Cup drew more than 1,000 fans, about double what many expected. And many of them continued making polo part of their weekend plans for the rest of the summer.

"I think it did bring some more people out," Stribling said. "I think there were two tournaments following that and attendance did pick up quite a bit."

The event raised about $16,000 for the Association's Stream Restoration Project in Kendrick Park, the perfect kickstart to a project that hadn't even previously been publicly announced.

The money was used to begin the next phase of the project, which included more studies and the writing of grants. A pair of grants netted the project $175,000.

"All of the sudden we had what appeared to be enough money to do Kendrick Park," Bent said. "And we're doing Kendrick Park ... because the natural floodplain is still there."

The project will restore a stretch of about 1,000 feet of stream at the park and includes taking out anything unnatural to the stream and then lining it with boulders to help the water flow cleanly.

Only one team will win the one-of-a-kind Goose Creek Cup on Sunday, but a year after the inaugural event, it's already pretty clear that there is no loser.

"The community went nuts," Bent said. "Half the people went out there to watch polo and the other half were out there for the stream project.

"Between the two of them, we knew we had a winner."