Russel Stimmel and Todd Thurston training in Argentina
For the past three years Team USPA has sent players to Argentina to be mentored by 7 goal professional Gaston Lauhlé. 24 year old Todd Thurston and 21 year old Russell Stimmel were selected this year for this opportunity. Over the next 10 weeks they will be sharing their experiences right here at PoloZone.com.
After a short stay in Wellington, Russell and I met up to make the long trip to Argentina on the 3rd of January. We both had talked to previous participants in the Argentina Team USPA opportunity and received a ton of valuable advice, but it wasn’t until we final got to Argentina that we could really figure out what we were getting into. We arrived to Intendente Alvear on the 4th and watched a practice our mentor, Gaston Lauhlé, was playing in. I had spent time in Alvear in 2011 with Eduardo Heguy so it was distantly familiar to me. Alvear is a small town with a relaxed atmosphere. We had a tournament to play on that coming Thursday, so we got right to it.
The first couple of days went by with us becoming acclimated to the weather and the horses. It is the middle of summer here with temperatures reaching the upper nineties. The horses have been turned out since August and have been eating rich alfalfa which made them very fresh for the first couple of rides. Gaston is a 7 goal player and he has quite an impressive organization, his methods are on par with the top players and breeders in the sport. We ride and stick-and-ball green horses in the morning and work on tuning up our made string in the afternoon for tournaments. We brought the horses to the club on Wednesday and left them in the corrals for game on Thursday.
The highest rated team in the tournament this week is 14 goals and our team was the under-dog at 13 goals. We came up short, but, this was expected as our ponies have just now had only two weeks out of pasture. Furthermore it has been some time since either Russell or myself have played fast-paced polo. Both of us were coming off a 2 month layoff of polo. Russell was playing 4 goal in the fall in Houston, and I was playing arena polo while finishing up at UVA. Without a team practice the jump to 14 goal was steep and we definitely felt the effects. We made mistakes and had a humbling loss to take in. However, we are here to learn and make mistakes, so although we may have hung our heads in those moments after the game, our minds were already thinking of tomorrow and how we could improve. Our second game was on Friday. We have more of a feel for the horses and our roles on the field. We got off to a slow start in the first half but made a big comeback in the 5th chukker to bring it within 2. The game slipped away in the 6th chukker, but we were both happy of how we bounced back from the loss the day before. Again we quickly had to identify our mistakes and prepare for game the next day. The third game took place on Saturday. We had our chances including some nice goals by Russell to keep us close in the second half, but once again the game slipped away from us. Although we lost our three games, we gained many valuable lessons that we could take to assure better success in the future.
This past week we have been working on the 6 young horses that we have between the two of us. Even after a week of riding they are all making improvements! After a much-needed rest to our playing string, we started riding them again yesterday to prepare them for practice at the club on Saturday and Sunday. The more we ride our playing string, the better they get. We are looking forward to the practice at the club and applying some of the lessons we learned from the tournament. With better fitness of the horses, we are both looking to concentrate on our own hitting and game sense in these upcoming practices. Gaston helps so much and provides us with invaluable words of encouragement and advice. Argentina has many lessons to teach, only if one is willing to learn.