Go to the RL Magazine on the Ralph Lauren home page. You’ll find a bunch of young polo players of a variety of ages and colors. They’re not professional models. They’re participants in Philadelphia’s Work to Ride program, a 25 year old initiative that takes kids from the poorest sections of the city and, in exchange for hard work and good grades, gives them a chance to learn to play the world’s most elite game.
Game Changers: A Look at Philadelphia’s Inspiring Work To Ride Program is the face of Ralph Lauren’s global spring campaign. It profiles four players who helped to launch the program to national attention: brothers Daymar and Kareem Rosser, Shariah Harris and Malachi Lyles.
The campaign was the brainchild of Sean Burke who at the tender age of 23 is head of marketing in New York for Ralph Lauren. “He is familiar with polo, had been involved with a couple of polo events and aware of us,” WTR founder and Executive Director Lezlie Hiner said. “He called in July and said, I don’t know if it will fly but do you mind if I pitch this. We didn’t think much would come of it. As it climbed the ranks (of Ralph Lauren marketing) we got more and more excited. It eventually got to the global marketing level and it tested well, so it was a go.
“They came out to the barn in October. At first the campaign was geared mostly to men and they picked six guys for the first shoot. They came back in the spring and got some girls involved and more kids,” Hiner said.
In addition to the global attention, Ralph Lauren gave WTR a $100,000 grant. Half will go to the Mecca Harris scholarship fund, which supports WTR graduates in college. The rest will be seed money for a capital campaign to build a much needed indoor arena.
25 years ago
Decades ago, the situation was much different. Ralph Lauren and polo’s governing body, the United States Polo Association, were locked in a protracted legal battle over the right to use the word polo and images of the sport. And Hiner was traveling around the mid-Atlantic polo circuit in a rattletrap rig full of little kids and castoff horses that sometimes made it to its destination, and sometimes did not.
The reception they got (when they made it) was not always welcoming.
Hiner remembers pulling into a local polo club and being told by a club member that the kids weren’t welcome on her polo field. “I was livid and the kids were trying to calm me down, saying ‘it’s OK, Lez’. It wasn’t OK,” she remembered.
And WTR was in the news not for its success in the world of fashion, but for a tragedy. In October 2003, days after playing in her last polo game at Lancaster Polo, 14-year-old Mecca Harris was shot, execution style, along with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, in the basement of their West Philadelphia home. The murders were never solved.
The Players
Four WTR graduates are the face of the RL spring campaign. Daymar Rosser, who joined WTR at age 5, was a two-time national interscholastic champion (once with his older brother Kareem) before attending Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI, where he helped to start the university’s polo team. He captained the team to the 2017 National Intercollegiate Championship in just the program’s second year. He is currently an intern at a marketing agency in Philadelphia, plays in high goal tournaments, and works as WTR’s barn manager.
Kareem Rosser captained the WTR team (the first-ever African American polo team) to the National Interscholastic Championship in 2011 and was named the Polo Training Foundation’s Polo Player of the Year. At Colorado State University he captained the team to the National Intercollegiate Championship in 2015 and was named the Intercollegiate Player of the Year. Both Kareem and Daymar were featured on HBO’s Real Sports.
Daymar and Kareem’s older brother, Jabar, aka ‘Killer Bee’, who might have been the most talented of the three, left the program to return to life on the streets.
Shariah Harris, who found the program at age 9 when her mom got lost driving elsewhere, won a full scholarship to Cornell University to major in large animal veterinary science and to play on the women’s polo team. She competed in the 2015 Thoroughbred Makeover, was named the Polo Training Foundation’s 2016 national interscholastic player of the year, traveled to Argentina and Nigeria to play in (and win) tournaments, and became the first African-American woman to play high goal polo when she was tapped for the 20-goal Silver Cup at the Greenwich (CT) Polo Club. Now 21 and a junior, she led the Cornell women’s polo team to the National Intercollegiate semifinals, while also mentoring younger WTR kids.
Malachi Lyles’ mom enrolled him in the WTR program at age 11. At age 18, he is considered a rising polo star, who has earned several All-Star selections at tournaments and has played with two of the world’s best polo players, Facundo Pieres and Adolfo Cambiaso, in Wellington, FL. He is also a working model signed to Fetch Models, who wrote in his book of goals just last June, ‘I will model for Ralph Lauren’.
Horses Make a Difference
Lezlie Hiner is a no-nonsense woman with a distinctive, ready laugh who spent years on the track training thoroughbreds. She started WTR after realizing that horses could make a huge difference in a child’s life. While working less than happily in the corporate world, she kept a horse at a stable in Philadelphia’s Lafayette Hills suburbs.
“The farm had an African American blacksmith who would bring kids from his neighborhood along on weekends. An 11 year old boy named Carl was a regular,” Hiner said. “One weekend as we were set to trailer out to trail ride, my friend said, ‘let’s take this little kid with us.’ I looked in the rearview mirror at this cute little kid standing at the end of the driveway watching us pull away and said, ‘we’re late but OK’. We went back, loaded him and a pony and that was it. He started hanging out with us every weekend.
“Having him around started my thinking about how horses will make a difference in a kid’s life. Other kids would drift in and we just formalized the setup. They would work their behinds off on Saturday and then on Sunday, we would go on trail rides or ride around on the property.”
Hiner soon outlined the plan for Work to Ride. She found a stable formerly used by the mounted police with a leaky roof, bad septic system, and little recent maintenance, vacated because it cost too much to revamp. WTR started in August 1994, when Sun Oil sponsored 20 non-violent boys from a youth study center. “They came for a whoooole month. It was definitely an eye-opening experience,” Hiner said. “They had a lot of issues, authority issues, behavioral issues. But it was very successful. ”
Twenty five years later, “I guess you stick to what you know,” Hiner says. “It’s always fun bringing in a new crop of kids, introducing them to new things, new ideas. Kids love to travel and we give them eye opening experiences. For the last six or seven years, the (Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds) has invited WTR kids to their pony camp. They take these kids who are definitely from a different socio-economic background, and keep them at their homes, and they ride with the children of the Chester County steeplechasing and fox hunting people. They spend the whole week with a whole different class of people. It’s a great introduction and they have a great time. They’ve been really good to us.”
Food, Water and a Pony
“Every kid deserves food, water, shelter and a pony,” reads one of many slogans posted at WTR’s Chamounix Equestrian Center.
‘Work To Ride programs and activities engage youth in educational, social and cultural experiences that are otherwise unavailable,’ says the WTR website. The kids build relationships and develop problem-solving skills through teamwork and cooperation. The stables become a home away from home and provide a second, positive family where the lesson is clear: Hard work and supportive relationships bring success. Activities at the stables, competitions and trips provide interaction with diverse people and expose kids to a variety of new experiences that would otherwise be unavailable.
Like playing polo with the world’s best players in Wellington, FL. Like traveling to Nigeria to play polo in a UNICEF tournament. Like getting a full ride scholarship to an Ivy League college.
Like becoming the face of a global fashion campaign.