John Rosene and the Barrington Hills Polo Club offers a nationally recognized polo school for newcomers to the sport helping generations of families play together on the field
When John Rosene was a boy of 9 years old, his mother signed him up for a horse-riding lesson at the Starlight Stable in Skokie. It was something to keep him busy, not a family tradition. He joined other children from his neighborhood on the bus ride over but didn’t make it to the trail ride. “When they put me on the horse, I was so scared that I got off and stayed at the barn while the other kids rode off,” Rosene said.
A few years later, the Rogers Park native attended a summer riding school at the Northwestern Stables in Morton Grove, now called Freedom Woods. Rosene started at the beginner’s level with the five-day-a-week program where each student learned how to saddle, ride, and hose down the horse, then letting their horse graze while holding its lead line. At 14, he took a job at the same barn where he learned to ride, having 21 horses in his daily care. Feeding, watering, and cleaning the tack and stalls was compensated with two dollars a day—and all the riding he could get in.
At 16, with his driver’s license and a car, Rosene took a job at the same barn for $200 a month and did that for a couple of years before college. “Very few boys stuck with horse riding by that age, so besides being able to ride as much as I could, all the girls were the attraction,” he said with his classic sense of humor.
Rosene bought his first horse during his college years during a gap year in Texas. Having returned to Northwestern University, he met his future wife, Karen, who he intended to impress with his horse-riding skills in a PE class. The two finished school in 1962, and married two years later. They each bought a horse and found an old dairy barn, through some friends, for boarding.
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