Fledgling Goochland Polo Club looks to hit its stride with new arena

The Goochland Polo Club is getting off its feet at Little Hawk Farm. (Jackie DiBartolomeo photos)

Out in Goochland County, off of Cardwell Road, is a farm called Little Hawk.

It spans around 35 idyllic acres and sits quietly in the community of Crozier. 

Yet a few nights per week, the farm gets a little bit louder with the pounding of galloping hooves and joyous whoops coming from a group of horse riders swinging mallets around, practicing polo.

It’s the sound of the recently formed Goochland Polo Club, a group made up of both youth and adult players looking to fill a niche as one of few local opportunities for Richmonders to practice the sport. 

And after a sizable project to add a polo arena to its ground at the end of May, courtesy of some Richmond supporters, the club is open for business and ready to play. 

“When we bought this farm I felt like we could build a club with that mentality of, let’s make it about horses, horsemanship, let’s have fun,” said club co-founder and coach Wynnie Angus. “Let’s make it accessible financially, socially; that’s kind of our goal right now.” 

Little Hawk Farm at 1625 Cardwell Road has a fabled equine history. It was originally a breeding facility for racehorses run by the Reynolds family starting decades ago, before parcels of the farm were purchased by equine veterinarian Tom Newton and his wife. Newton operated his practice and a horse breeding operation there for several decades before retiring. Certain surrounding parcels are still owned by the Reynolds family. 

When Newton retired, Angus, who’s also a vet, and husband Jon, who assists the club, purchased Little Hawk Farm in 2022. Along with the polo club, the farm serves as an equine boarding facility. 

Angus, a Richmond native, is no stranger to the polo scene. While an undergrad at the University of Virginia, she was a member of the school’s polo team, alongside local sisters Sybil Greenhalgh Price and Meg Greenhalgh Pryde, who now make up the Goochland Polo Club’s two other coaches. 

All three women grew up playing polo, with the sport even running in the Greenhalgh sisters’ family; their father, who passed away in 2024, was well-known Virginia polo player George Partridge Greenhalgh III. 

Some of the horses at Goochland Polo Club.

Angus said that after she and her husband purchased the farm, they began discussing forming a club for Richmond-area locals interested in the sport, which has been dwindling in popularity and growing in price. 

Noticing the lack of programs for young polo players and the absence of opportunities for Richmond-area kids to “learn good horsemanship,” Angus formulated the idea of the club with friend and former teammate Greenhalgh Price, and the two enlisted Greenhalgh Pryde.

“We’ve been roping her into our adventures for about 15 years,” Angus told BizSense of Greenhalgh Pryde, who also works full time in Richmond as the CEO of cosmetics company Brandefy. 

As of a few weeks ago, the Goochland Polo Club is now an officially sanctioned U.S. Polo Association club. 

The club is not an official 501(c)(3), but affiliation with the USPA makes donations possible for the club.

The Goochland Polo Club began teaching lessons this past winter and enlisted three young players. They spent the club’s first few meetings practicing on just a couple of horses living at the farm, even through snowstorms and 20-degree nights.

“They were showing enough promise that we started collecting a few more horses, and we just built the program from there,” Angus said. “It’s been one enthusiastic additional person at a time, with kids that were willing to play and keep the funds rolling in so we can keep adding horses.”

The polo club hosts around four weekly lessons, with four to six students per lesson. Angus said those numbers get players practicing and playing right away. 

Players can expect to pay $100 for their first lesson, and $75 per lesson for further lessons, with Angus noting that the price tag is lower than what players would expect to pay in places like Charlottesville, where interest in the sport remains stronger than in the Richmond area. 

“We want to take people in and keep them,” Angus said. “We’re priced low at this point, compared to other polo clubs.”

The polo club has 11 horses, which have mainly come through donation.

Though it takes beginner polo players, the club mostly targets those with some riding experience. It also began playing its first round of official league games against other area clubs this spring, with some young Goochland Polo Club members playing against groups like Roseland and Chesapeake middle school players. 

The club now has around 20 to 25 members, and 11 horses, which, with names like Frita and Pepsi, have mostly come to the club through donations from organizations like UVA’s Polo Club and from locals looking to support the club.

Much of the club’s funding thus far has come from donations from area organizations and individuals who want to keep the sport alive, along with lesson fees, Greenhalgh Pryde said. 

“It’s basically people who are excited about polo coming together to support polo in the area,” Greenhalgh Pryde said. “It’s been amazing how quickly it’s come together.” 

And just a half year after the club got off the ground, the newly built arena is the first step toward giving it more credibility in the statewide polo scene. 

The arena, which was a “major five-figure addition” to the club, stretches 122 feet wide and 214 feet long, with boarded walls and a sand base. 

Described by one club member as a “shot in the arm” for the organization, the arena was funded and worked on in part by local club sponsors Creative Contracting, GM Construction, 1850 Investments and the Morphis Group, among others. 

Construction took around two weeks of planning, and around four days of physical work in May before it officially opened. 

“We’re moving up in the world,” Angus said. “We have a really nice arena; we’re hitting the marks to become a real polo club instead of where we were.” 

With the arena now built, the next step for Goochland Polo Club is figuring out how to make more use of an onsite barn near the arena and continuing to grow enrollment and programming, Angus said.

Angus said if she can give a few kids the same experience she had growing up playing polo, she’ll be satisfied.

And though she and her husband may have only owned Little Hawk for a few years, she said she hopes their ownership can add a new chapter to the farm’s legacy. 

“This farm is sort of legendary in the local horse world,” she said. “[There were] race horses, fox hunters and horses bred at this farm. It was a cool way to bring it back to life.”

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