Penn Intramural Polo League Off to Slow Start

It's official! The Penn Intramural Polo League is up and running. All the league needs is participants.

The University's Department of Recreation has announced that this spring, for the first time, Club Polo will be offered. Games will take place at Penn Park, where all other equestrian events are held.

Though Club Polo already exists, Penn Rec believed that an intramural league would offer a more accessible version of the sport. "Not everyone knows or loves polo enough to join a club team," said Mike Carnibel, the department's director, "but there are a lot of folks at Penn who want to try polo or play it casually, folks who have three to six horses and three friends who also have three to six horses."

The league is now looking for players to create teams and begin competing. The league needs at least two teams, for obvious reasons, and each team must have a minimum of four players. Though the number of necessary horses differs based on length of the game, generally each player will need at least three horses. 

"Sign ups have been slow," Carnibel admits. "We think it's because most people bring, at most, one horse to school with them. Having three horses at school can be tough logistically if you don't live somewhere with stables on the premise, like Domus, or if you don't maintain a country home nearby."

Still, Penn Rec is hopeful. A number of fraternities have already committed to play, and are chartering planes to carry horses.

Clayton Kinting, a Wharton junior in Zetes, says he knows the league will take off. "Everybody loves polo. You don't even have to be rich. Poor people have horses too, after all."