NEWS

Dear USPA Member,

I want to thank you for the opportunity to lead our Association. It is an honor to represent the membership and a responsibility I look forward to with confidence.

My first duty will be to continue to inspire trust. Chip Campbell did a great job in this regard and I want to thank him for his efforts and for setting the USPA on a better course during his tenure. He has my respect and admiration and should be thanked for his honest and forthright leadership. Trust is the foundation for success in any organization, and without it nothing can be accomplished.

In order to share my vision and objectives for the Association, let me start by explaining my perspective. The USPA has three primary functions: to award handicaps, to provide rules and to give players the opportunity to participate in long-standing tournaments. This is the purpose of membership dues and what members are entitled to receive when they join the Association. Therefore, these are the primary areas to which we should direct our focus. We must be intentional about doing a great job in administering these three functions, otherwise a polo player has no need to join the USPA. I make this point to distinguish our core purposes apart from the deployment of the financial resources of the Association.

In the past, the mission of the Association was to promote the sport. Under Chip’s administration, we amended that mission to state that our overarching objective is to improve the game of polo. This slight shift in focus is based on the belief that in order to grow the sport we must constantly strive to make it the best it can be. In the words of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, “a product either speaks for itself, or it doesn’t.” No amount of promotion or marketing can convince a person to spend their hard-earned money to play, spectate or purchase a product if they are not first convinced by the sport itself.

Beyond improving our three primary functions, the financial resources we share should be invested in strategies that are designed to make polo better for playing members, spectators and our U.S. Polo Assn. apparel customers. These three groups are our core constituents so making polo better in their eyes will result in growth of the sport in all respects.

As a byproduct of setting our sights on improvement, we have a duty to measure the amount of improvement achieved by each strategy and reconcile it against the amount we invested. This constant measurement must be integral to the USPA in order to manage effectively.

These are the principal elements we will be focusing on within the USPA. My goal is to bring all of us together in the pursuit of making polo better. Only by improving the experience of the sport for everyone can we expect growth to be realized.

Best,
Stewart Armstrong