"Marco,” yells a team of the bike poloists from one side of the IM Sports-West tennis court room.
“Polo,” yells the other.
And just like that, they’re off.
MSU Bikes Service Center manager Tim Potter said the idea to start an informal club of bike polo enthusiasts first came to him and his friends aboutsix years ago.
“I’ve seen a lot of videos on YouTube and whatnot and it looked like a lot of fun,” Potter said. “As volunteers, we used to do a lot of bike projects on campus here. We started just for something different to do ... and we just had a great time.”
During the cold winter months, the club meets at 5 p.m. every Friday in IM Sport-West. The group also meets and plays in various outdoor locations when it’s warm out such as Munn field, Demonstration fieldor even underutilized tennis courts at local schools.
Bike polo is similar to regular horse polo and other goal-scoring games.
And while players say the rules are easy to understand, it’s actually playing that can sometimes be the hard part. Two goals are placed on opposite ends of the court. If a player’s foot hits the ground, he or she must ride to the side of the court, touch the wall and come back in. A player may move the ball around the court with any part of their mallet, but in order for a goal to count, the ball must be hit with the ends of a mallet.
Some of the higher leagues of bike polo allow contact with the shoulders and bike. However, Potter said the MSU-based group usually limits contact to mallet-to-mallet so they don’t hurt themselves or their bikes.
There is even official bike polo equipment for established teams.
But for the bike polo club it’s kept pretty simple.
“We’re big-time DIY,” said bike polo coordinator and MSU spokesman Layne Cameron. “Nights that we don’t play polo, we’ll get together for a mallet build night. We’ll just go over somebody’s house. I usually have a lot of these leftover poles and then the PVC pipe. We’ll have someone cut the PVC pipe and build them.”
The group is looking for more people to join their weekly competition. All they need is a bike and a helmet.
“I’ve been bicycling in almost every known way (including underwater bicycling) for decades, and bike polo is by far the most fun I’ve ever had on two wheels,” Potter said in an email. “We think if more students knew about it we’d have a lot more people playing. We think there’s great potential for it to become a student club sport if more people tried it and realized how much fun it is.”
Fisheries and wildlife graduate student Janet Hsiao is one of the group’s newest members. Hsiao said she found out about bike polo from the Lansing Bike Party she had been a part of.
“They rode every Friday afternoon when it was warm,” Hsiao said. “And then it got cold. I was looking for more opportunities to ride my bike. ... It’s hard. I feel like they’re going really easy on me but I think they’re all very encouraging and that’s why I came back. ... They fixed up my bike the first day I got here and I was like, ‘Yeah, I love this group.’”
