Sisters Polo Club to host first-ever tournament this weekend

Published 12:16 pm Monday, August 4, 2025

SISTERS – Summer Saturday mornings mean polo is to be played for members of the Sisters and Bend polo clubs.

Once the weather turns nice and the horses have worked into playing shape, a group of six to 10 polo players bring their multiple horses for a couple of “chukkas” to get ready to compete in tournaments throughout the Pacific Northwest.

This year, a tournament is coming to them.

This weekend the Sisters Polo Club will host a two-day tournament called the Wild West Cup, featuring five teams of at least four riders and 80 horses competing over two days of competition. Matches are scheduled for 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on both Saturday and Sunday.

“What is cool about the tournament, it is the first tournament that we are having in the Bend area in over five years,” said Katey Kelley of the Sisters Polo Club. “Everybody wanted to come. We had a waiting list of teams that wanted to come but we had to say, ‘Sorry, next year guys.’ We just don’t have the stabling yet. Each player has four to five horses.

“When I see our stabling getting done, I foresee this being the hub of the Northwest,” Kelley continued. “This is where people are going to want to play polo because of the field and because of the location. This tournament is kickstarting that vibration up for the Northwest.”

This year was a breakthrough year for the new polo club, as it was placed on the United States Polo Association Pacific Northwest Circuit. In the winter club members felt they were ready to host a tournament and requested to be put on the schedule of tournaments that run from early June to late September.

“Normally we have to travel,” said Sisters Polo Club member Kelsey Carson. “We feel really fortunate to host this year. We said we would love to host, and we were put on the calendar.”

The tournament will be held at the Sisters Polo Club, located at 68590 George Cyrus Road in Sisters, and will bring teams from Bend, Spokane, Seattle and La Grande, with players also coming from as far away as Argentina and England. Spectators are welcome and entry is $10 per vehicle.

Polo is a sport played on horseback in which two teams of four players (each on a horse) on a field roughly three times as big as a football field use long mallets to try to hit a ball through their opponent’s goal. It is like soccer, hockey, and horse racing mixed together.

Three years ago, RJ Schreiber, a software salesman in Bend, bought a hayfield in Sisters and began to turn it into a polo facility, thus beginning the Sisters Polo Club. Schreiber had started playing polo while a student at Oregon State University and wanted to make the sport more available.

“We pretty much started from scratch. We wanted to bring more polo to Central Oregon,” said Schreiber, the founder of the Sisters club and owner of the facility. “We have the Bend Polo Club, but we wanted to bring polo to Sisters and provide more opportunities for people to play polo and have access to it.”

Another way the Sisters Polo Club is hoping to grow the sport is by offering lessons to beginners. A number of the club members did not start playing polo until they were adults. Schreiber and Carson began playing for the first time while in college.

“We all started as adults, which is pretty cool,” Kelley said. “A lot of sports you have to start as a kid. We have a 65-year-old student who is just learning. You can play fast, like we are trying to do, or you can go slow. We try to make it so a lot of people are welcome to play. You can be a beginner.”