Five Minutes on the Sidelines with… FTA Sport
At the start of 2019, the UKPA were approached by David Lashmar from filming company FTA Sport. He had seen polocrosse online and thought it might be a good sport to film and add to FTA Sport’s online subscription service.
Despite not knowing anything about equine sport in general, FTA came along to Early Season tournament to ‘give it a go’!
Since then they have filmed at almost every event this summer, including the internationals – they even headed over to France in August to cover the European Challenge. David tells us about the difficulties they faced starting out, and what 2020 has in store.
Q:How did you first hear about polocrosse and decide it was something you would like to film?
A: Quite honestly, it was pure luck. I just came across it on the internet one day and thought it might be worth looking into.
Q: What challenges did you face when you started to film the sport?
A: We knew absolutely nothing about polocrosse, but we had also never filmed an equine event before at all, so it was an interesting learning curve. Compared to other sports it’s a bit more difficult as sometimes it hard to see the ball as it gradually gets covered in dirt. That nice white ball soon goes grey and is hard to see through a viewfinder!
Q: Did you find the rules of the sport easy to follow or did it take a while to get into it?
A: No not at all! From where we were filming sometimes it was hard to decide if a goal had been scored or not due to the goal judges not always signalling clearly! Then we were left wondering what the umpire decision was and how they came to that conclusion. Restarts could be particularly confusing because of course they didn’t all occur from the centre points and no hand signals to indicate why. To a complete outsider, it’s not the easiest sport to follow if there’s no commentary!
Most people who watch seem to have a connection to polocrosse either as a player or a family member so they will already have an idea of what if going on.
Q: Did you have a favourite filming venue or tournament?
A: Probably Arden tournament because we were on the opposite side to the scorers and the crowd. That allowed us to capture them in the filming and help create an atmosphere.
Q: Why would you tell non-polocrosse players to trying watching the game?
A: It’s a really interesting sport! It has all the attributes for a family day out in a fun and relaxed atmosphere. Most spectators are attached to clubs or individual players, so hopefully we are helping get it out to a wider audience.
Q: And finally, can you give us any clues as to what we might expect from next season’s filming?
A: This year we learned a lot – next year we will have a better idea about camera positions, presentation and graphics! We will also hopefully drag some of you in to commentate. We use wireless remote controlled cameras when filming ice hockey and will aim to incorporate them into filming polocrosse as we can use more of them.
Want to relive the action from 2019?
All streams from the summer can still be viewed online!