By LAURILEE McMICHAEL

“Mean as” (that means good) horses and higher playing standards meant plenty of new experiences for a young Turangi polocrosse player in Australia recently.

Mareka Prentice, 16, spent a month living and working on Australian farms and playing polocrosse courtesy of a New Zealand Polocrosse Council scholarship he won earlier this year. It covered half the cost of his airfares to Australia and arranged for families to host him.

The talented polocrosse player, who is part of the Turangi-based Tuwharetoa Polocrosse Club, was last year selected for the New Zealand Junior Polocrosse Squad and had an outstanding season (“I won a bit of stuff”, he says modestly).

Mareka was based in rural New South Wales, where he spent three weeks living near Narrabri and another week near Meriwa.

But although he spent much of his time working on his host families’ farms and experiencing rural Aussie life, Mareka was also there to improve his polocrosse skills.
He played polocrosse every weekend for whichever team needed another player, or for the club of the family he was staying with at the time.

“I liked it, it was heaps of fun,” he says. “They gave me their best horses, it was mean as. They’ve got way mean horses, really good and they ride all year round which is different to what we do. Plus, it’s all warm and stuff over there and their horses are in good condition.”

Mareka says the Australian polocrosse scene, which is played at a higher level than in New Zealand really helped him brush up on his own technique.

“They [the Australians] are way better…I just improved my skills and I learned a few more horsemanship skills and stuff just watching them play and just learning heaps of stuff from them…the best part was riding their horses.”

Now that he is back in New Zealand Mareka is working as a farm cadet on a sheep and beef farm near Taumarunui, with a view to making agriculture his career.

He intends to play polocrosse again during the upcoming season which kicks off in November, and says he intends to start seriously training soon. He hopes to have two horses to work with this year, his main horse Alize and a back-up mount, Taringa.

His ultimate polocrosse goal is to make it into the New Zealand polocrosse team which will travel to England to play in the Polocrosse World Cup in 2011. In the shorter term, he hopes to this season be selected for the New Zealand Polocrosse Colts Squad.