The polo team went down to its fifth consecutive defeat as the Skidmore horesemen trampled the Crimson, 11-3 Friday night in Saratoga Springs. "They were ready for it and we weren't, it's as simple as that," Crimson high scorer Cabot Lodge said yesterday.

The disastrous first chukker, in which Skidmore scored eight unanswered goals proved to make the difference. The squads played evenly, each scoring three times, in the final three periods.

Harvard finally scored in the second chukker when Captain Bill Griffin worked the ball in along the boards and neatly popped it into the goal. The chukker ended with Skidmore holding its virtually insurmountable eight-goal lead at 9-1.

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The teams exchanged goals for the remainder of the contest as the Crimson could never draw any closer. In the third chukker Lodge scooped one in while crossing in front of the goal. He later closed out what little Harvard scoring there was in the fourth chukker, taking the ball from the middle of the rink and walloping it in from thirty feet out for a picture-perfect goal.

The Harvard riders never seemed to get used to the strange terrain of the Skidmore ring which was dry sawdust instead of the customary semi-packed dirt surface. Crisply hit shots rolled fifteen or twenty feet and sunk rather than flying across the arena. "It was terrible--we had to use our mallets like shovels to dig the ball out of the ground," Lodge said.