As you may have heard the UK sent a team to Texas last week for play over a few weekends, what you may not hjave heard was that one of the UK women had a fairly serious acident after crossing too close behind. This is an interesting comment from Paul Johnson after reviewing the video of the game.

Paul Johnson

Anyone that has been involved in our umpire forum training knows that it has always been my contention that if crossing penalties are called when they occur, they won’t continue to the point that an injury occurs. In order for that to be true, the first crossing penalty can’t be the one that causes the injury. In the recent first test match against the UK, a crossing occurred with a serious injury very early in the match, only about 5 1/2 minutes into the first chukka. Since the injury occurred so early in the game, this was an incident that might have disproved my theory that it’s never the first crossing that causes the injury. I was having the game video taped, so I was able to review the game to see if a crossing had occurred before the injury. In my review, in those 5 1/2 minutes of play, I counted 15 crossing penalties before the one that caused the injury. None of the crossing penalties were called, so the players continued to cross until someone got hurt.

Any time people are around horses, they can get hurt just from being in and around horses. People can also be injured on the polocrosse field because of the nature of horse activities. Horses can stumble, slip, buck, rear, run off, etc. causing an injury. Those types of risks are inherent in any horse activity. Those risks are also present in polocrosse, and always will be. My belief is that there shouldn’t be anything about playing polocrosse that is any more dangerous than just riding horses. The rules already don’t allow anything to happen on the field that is unsafe. If we would just enforce the rules, no one would ever be injured because they were playing polocrosse.

This is a perfect opportunity for our association to start enforcing our crossing rules. EVERY TIME a crossing occurs a penalty should be called and a goal awarded, just like our rules already require. Let’s quit making our players risk their lives to play this sport. Let’s enforce the rules and insure that no one will ever be injured because they played polocrosse.

Paul Johnson
Cell phone 512-698-6827