The undefeated White Birch Farm team (L to R)-Peter Brant, Mariano Aguerre, Hilario Ulloa and Santino Magrini.
Greenwich Polo Club manager Alex Roldan laid out the rosters for the six teams that will be competing in the 2015 East Coast Open Championship. The public matches will take place over three consecutive Sundays in Greenwich, CT, commencing on Sunday, August 23, 2015, continue on Sunday, August 30, 2015 and conclude with the Championship Match on Sunday, September 6, 2015.
The USPA will live stream the Semi-Finals on ChukkerTV, and NBC Sports Network will air a 60-minute national broadcast of the East Coast Open Final on September 13, 2015.
Peter Brant’s White Birch Farm team (Santino Magrini, Hilario Ulloa, Mariano Aguerre and Peter Brant) will take the field in defense of their 2014 title and will be joined by Airstream (Peter Orthwein, Guille Aguero, Matias Magrini and Michel Dorignac), Audi (Marc Ganzi, TBA, Nic Roldan and Gonzalo Garcia del Rio), KIG (Bash Kazi, Valerio Zubiaurre, Salvador Ulloa and Andres Weiss), Turkish Airlines (Bruce Colley, Joaquin Panelo, Tomas Garcia del Rio and Stevie Orthwein) and Team Name TBA (Chris Brant, Nick Manifold, Joao Paulo Ganon and Tommy Biddle).
“I like my team,” said Audi captain Marc Ganzi. Ganzi’s team remains a bit of a mystery with Ganzi, Nic Roldan and Gonzalo Garcia del Rio as the only confirmed members of the lineup. “We’ll announce our fourth player later this week,” he offered.
Ganzi has enjoyed a great deal of success on the polo fields from Santa Barbara, where his Audi team swept the high-goal season in 2008 to wins in the C. V. Whitney Cup, the USPA Gold Cup and the United States Open, just to name a few. This will be Audi’s first run at the Pacific Coat Open, but Ganzi is confident of a good showing.
White Birch, on the other hand, has enjoyed unfettered dominance over the Northeast having won all major 20-goal tournaments there for the past two years. This year Peter Brant’s White Birch team scored wins in the Monty Waterbury Cup and the Butler Handicap, and remains undefeated.
The East Coast Open was founded in Rhode Island in 1905 and was played continuously until World War I. It had a renaissance starting in 1978 when Donald Little, then President of the United States Polo Association and Captain of the Myopia Polo Club, resurrected the tournament and brought it to Myopia Polo Club in South Hamilton, Massachusetts where it was played until the early 2000’s. Through its history, some of the best players in the world including many 10 goal players (the highest possible handicap) such as Mariano Aguerre, Mike Azzaro, Tommy Biddle, and Gonzalo Pieres, Sr. have played and won this tournament and inspired many of today’s players to pick up their mallets.
Since 1905, the Perry Cup trophy has symbolized this high-goal championship and was donated by Mrs. Marsden Jaseal Perry – wife of a respected businessman, well-known clubman and owner of the largest Shakespearian library in the United States – for the competition. It was designed by noted American sculptor Oscar L. Lenz and the silversmith was Gorham Manufacturing Company in Rhode Island. The cup has recently been restored and is making its second renaissance debut after nearly 15 years.
The final of the East Coast Open will signal an end to the high-goal competition in the Northeast for the year with White Birch Farm looking to finish the season with an undefeated record, having won the Monty Waterbury Cup and the Butler Handicap earlier in the summer.