Saturday May 18th the beautiful New Bridge Polo Club hosted a USPA NYTS tournament and clinic, the second for Zone 4. It was a great day and a great turn out for both the 10am clinic and the 1:30pm featured NYTS Tournament Match with local participants from Aiken, as well as traveling in from Charleston, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Starting the day off, Liz Holson, USPA Youth Polo Instructor, led clinic participants through some drills & skills and final scrimmage. She began with a foot mallet exercise aimed at improving polo swing mechanics and techniques, pairing up advanced junior players with younger novice ones. “Learning from your peers can be one of the most effective tools for getting younger players to quickly catch on to the basics”, said Holson. The clinic then moved into the mounted session, incorporating drills that practiced ride-offs followed by backshots and effective hooking practices. The final portion of the clinic focused on a half field scrimmage coached by Jimmy Wright (Young Player Outreach) and Jeff Shuler (Team USPA). Shuler and Wright quickly stepped into their coaching roles leading their teams to a 2-2 tie.
The feature match of the day was the National Youth Tournament Series Zone 4 match between New Bridge White (Jeff Shuler of Team USPA, Wesley Bryan, Lucas Arellano and Jack McLean, who started off the match with a magnificent rendition of our National Anthem) and New Bridge Green (Augustin Arellano, Tess Pimsner, Tommy Huber and Hank Watson). Both teams were very competitive and came out strong, but it was the New Bridge White team that took an immediate lead by working as a team and effectively taking the man they quickly scored goals by the end of the first chukker. New Bridge Green soon found their footing and organized a strategy that only allowed New Bridge White to score two more goals in the remainder of the game. Unfortunately, after the hard first chukker New Bridge Green couldn’t quite rebuild their momentum, but finished strong with two goals of their own before the final horn. New Bridge White def. New Bridge Green 6-2.
All players did an exceptional job adapting to playing with a team of their peers and with some riding unfamiliar horses. Wesley Bryan, Augustin Arellano, Jeff Shuler (Team USPA) and Tess Pimsner were nominated as All-Stars for Zone 4, making them eligible to compete in the Labor Day Championship match at Virginia International, VA.
Thank you to the Umpire, LLC who brought visiting umpires from the Mid-States circuit (Circuit Governor, Mark Sedacca and Randy Thayer) as well as YPO Jimmy Wright. All umpires worked closely with Bradley Biddle to use the Aiken NYTS game as part of their learning opportunity and were coached with headsets throughout the game.
Trophies and All-Star Awards were presented by New Bridges Russ McCall, Mid-State Cir. Gov Mark Sedacca and Kris Bowman, COO of USPA Programs. Thanks to the All-Star Committee (Will Tankard of Team USPA, Willie Harnett and Craig Fraser- all Alumni of the I/I program) for donating their time to watch the game and observe the players to rate and asses their abilities on the field as demonstrated thorough Sportsmanship, Horsemanship, Team Play and Playing Ability. The Aiken Standard and The Aiken Horse were both on scene for the feature game, taking photos and quotes for upcoming articles about Junior Polo and the USPA’s NYTS program.
A big thank you goes out to Kristen Galvan, Russ McCall, and Raza Kazmi for putting together such an event. And as always thank you to the parents of these incredibly talented young polo players, without you and your commitment to the sort events like this would not be possible.
Wesley Bryan, Augustine Arellano, Jeff Shuler, Tess Pimsner
