The Sunday afternoon ritual founded in 1962 by Don Cross, Peter Winkelman and Tim Gridley returns to the West Lake Road area for July and August. The headline charity match on July 26 will benefit Crouse Health’s Baker Regional NICU, which last summer pulled in more than $114,000 from a crowd of over 550.
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An old habit getting ready for a new July
Drive south from the village of Skaneateles on Route 41A for about a mile and you will see the long grass field and the white rail fencing that marks the Skaneateles Polo Club at 783 Andrews Road. By the first Sunday in July, the chukka markers will be staked, the goal posts will be repainted, and a long line of pickup trucks pulling two-horse trailers will start arriving from Cleveland, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Buffalo and Aiken, South Carolina.
This is the 64th summer of organized polo on this stretch of land. The club traces its modern run back to 1962, when Don Cross, Peter Winkelman and Tim Gridley returned from indoor polo sessions at Cornell University led by Dr. Stephen “Doc” Roberts and decided Skaneateles should have a field of its own. Dwight Winkelman, Peter’s father and the president of D.W. Winkelman Construction, had played polo since prep school and built the first field next to his airplane hangar on West Lake Road that same year.
That original strip was not regulation size. A proper 300-yard by 160-yard field was constructed in 1972, and the club hosted the United States Polo Association Northeast Circuit 8-Goal championship there the very next year.
The 2026 calendar, anchored by Crouse
The club traditionally opens on the first Sunday of July. In 2026 that falls on July 5. The locked-in fixture on the summer calendar is the charity match that brings the largest crowd of the year. The 2026 Crouse Health Polo for Preemies will be played on Sunday, July 26, 2026, with gates opening at 1 p.m. and the match throw-in at 3 p.m.
For comparison, here is what the 2025 club calendar looked like, published by Central New York Polo (the parent organization that ties Skaneateles to its sister field at Preble Valley):
The pattern has held for several years. The 2025 calendar carried nine Sundays, with seven named cup finals or memorial matches and two open Sundays held in reserve. A spectator who circled the dates in pen could have planned all of June with confidence the field would be in use.
The Winkelman Cup, traditionally first up, honors the family that built the original field. The Dave Chase Memorial, traditionally the closer, honors the man who took the club from a handful of local riders to a fixture on the East Coast circuit.
What Sundays look like at the field
The deal is simple. Sundays at 3 p.m. in July and August, weather permitting, admission free except for the Crouse benefit. The club tells visitors to bring a picnic, a lawn chair and a pair of binoculars because the action at the far end of the field can be hard to track without help.
A modern game runs about two hours and is broken into segments called chukkas. Two teams of four players each, riding ponies and swinging long wooden mallets, work a small hard ball toward the opposing goal. Spectators are invited onto the field at halftime to walk down a divot or two, an old polo tradition meant to repair the turf the horses tear up.
After the final chukka, children are encouraged to meet the horses. The riders sign autographs. The horses get hosed down. The picnic crowd files back to its cars carrying empty wine bottles and folded blankets. By 7 p.m. the field is quiet again.
The crowd that turns up is a mix. There are families from Marcellus and Auburn who treat the polo field the way other families treat the drive-in. There are second-home owners from the south end of the lake who walk over from West Lake Road. There are Cornell veterinary students who come because they want to be near the ponies. The parking lot, packed with everything from minivans to vintage Mercedes, captures the cross-section better than any program could.
The man who made it grow
If you spend any time around the club, the name David O. Chase will come up before the first chukka ends. Chase was introduced to polo by Ty Yardley in 1966, the year after the USPA-sanctioned polo school in Skaneateles enrolled 20 students, and went on to serve as club president for nearly three decades. He started polo schools, pushed for women’s polo at Skaneateles in 1976, and captained the United States Olympic exhibition team that same year.
Chase also brought the spotlight. In 1968, local Syracuse television began broadcasting Skaneateles matches. In 1979, the club inaugurated the “Four Pony Opera,” a benefit for the Syracuse Opera. In 1985, the CBS Evening News featured the club in a national broadcast.
Chase died in 1995 while training a polo pony in Florida. The August closing match each year carries his name.
Marty Cregg, two decades in the saddle
The club today is run by Marty Cregg, who was introduced to polo by Chase in 1978 and now wears three hats at once. Cregg serves as club president and team captain at Skaneateles and also chairs the Museum of Polo and Hall of Fame Center in Lake Worth, Florida. When the Skaneateles men’s team travels for winter tournaments in Florida and South Carolina, Cregg is the man holding the lineup card.
In a 2017 interview with the Finger Lakes magazine, Cregg explained what makes a polo player. “The horse,” he said, was the most important variable, followed by riding skills and the spatial sense of “understanding where to go next.”
It is a smaller world than most outsiders realize. Cregg notes there are roughly 4,500 polo players in the United States, about 50 to 70 per state. A Sunday in Skaneateles, on the strength of those numbers, is one of the only places in upstate New York where a passerby can watch the sport free of charge.
Crouse, the NICU and the July 26 match
The biggest day on the Andrews Road calendar is no longer a polo match in the purest sense. It is a fundraiser that uses a polo match as its centerpiece. The Crouse Health Polo for Preemies series began in 2016 and benefits the Baker Regional NICU, which serves a 14-county region of Central New York.
The growth curve has been steep. At the third annual event in 2018, the Crouse Health Foundation reported more than $49,000 in net proceeds. By last summer the same event was a different animal. The 2025 edition on July 27 drew more than 550 guests and raised more than $114,000, with Syracuse Men’s Basketball head coach Adrian Autry and members of his team attending as special guests.
The 2026 sponsor roster, already published by the Crouse Health Foundation, signals the same scale of operation. CNY Fertility Center returns as presenting sponsor. Neonatal Associates of CNY underwrites the Kidz Zone. Iroquois Healthcare Association underwrites the Little Fighters sponsorship. UBS Financial Services and The Savage Homestead LLC are listed as team sponsors. Partnership Properties, Thompson Hine LLP and Manatt Phelps & Phillips LLP appear in supporting tiers.
For 2026 inquiries, the Crouse Health Foundation lists Gracie Thorpe, interim executive director, at 315-470-8405 and [email protected].
Why the club still draws crowds
Polo will always be the sport with the highest barrier to entry in the room. A working pony costs more than most cars. A string of ponies, which is what a serious player needs, costs more than most houses. The Sunday afternoon ritual on Andrews Road has survived in this corner of New York for one practical reason. The barrier is on the players, not the spectators.
Free admission for eight Sundays a summer, one ticketed Sunday for charity, and a 64-year-old habit of inviting children onto the field after the last chukka. That is the math that has kept the gates open since Dwight Winkelman first cut the grass next to his hangar in 1962.
The 2026 season is expected to open on the first Sunday of July, July 5, following the format the club has used in recent years. The match on July 26 is the one the entire 14-county Baker Regional NICU service area has reason to put on a calendar.
Sources
- Crouse Health Foundation, “2026 Crouse Health Polo for Preemies”
- Crouse Health Foundation, “2025 Crouse Health Polo for Preemies” recap
- Crouse Health Foundation, “2018 Crouse Health Polo for Preemies”
- Spectrum News, “Polo match helps premature, sick newborns at Crouse,” July 30, 2018
- Kihm Winship, “Polo in Skaneateles,” Dec 2, 2010
- Life in the Finger Lakes, “The Best Sport You’ve Never Seen”
- CNY Central, “Your Town Skaneateles: Polo Club offers rare peek into one of world’s oldest team sports”
- The Cattails, “Skaneateles Polo” event listing
- Central New York Polo Club, 2025 schedule Facebook post, Feb 3, 2025
- United States Polo Association, Skaneateles Polo Club page
