The Polings - A Family United

Doctors Patty and Bob Poling of the Poling Medical Center are well known on Marco Island. The dynamic husband-wife team arrived on the island in 2005 and have made a huge impact on the island, not only through their medical center, but through the academic and athletic achievements of their four children, Rosie, Mickey, Ellie, and Maggie. The oldest and youngest have recently won important awards at graduation from their respective schools.

Rosie Poling just graduated from Harvard University, where she was a member of the rowing team. At graduation she was recognized as winner of the prestigious Francis H. Burr ’09 Scholarship as Harvard’s top female athlete. Her baby sister Maggie won Marco Island Charter Middle School’s Mickey Mendel scholarship.

The Francis H. Burr ’09 Scholarship was first awarded in 1918. It is awarded to two seniors – one from a men’s team and one from a women’s team - who best combine Burr’s remarkable qualities of character, leadership, scholarship, and athletic ability.

Rosie will use her scholarship to attend Cambridge University in the UK. Maggie will attend Lely High School in the fall.

"Rosie graduated from Lely in 2017 and just graduated from Harvard two weeks ago,” Patty Poling said when asked for a rundown of her children’s academic achievements to date. "Mickey graduated from Lely in 2019. He is now going into his junior year at NYU. He’s always loved the city. He likes to travel. He actually spent his first year in Florence, Italy. Ellie just graduated from Lely. She’s going to Georgetown next year. Maggie just finished MICMS - she will be Lely Class of 2025.”

The Polings arrived on the island after serving in an under-served area of North Carolina as part of the National Health Service Corps.

"We served in rural North Carolina, where there weren’t many physicians or medical facilities,” Patty Poling said. "Bob’s dad passed away suddenly while we were there. So, we finished our commitment and stayed an extra two years. Then we thought it might be best to be close to family. His family was from Ohio, my parents lived full time on Marco. So, we decided we’d come down and kind of take care of them. My joke is that they took more care of us than we took care of them. With the kids and needing that extra help, just getting the kids back and forth to places. We came down here in 2005. Rosie was in kindergarten. Mickey was four at the time and Ellie was two.”

The Polings chose a location on the island that would allow their children to ride their bicycles or walk to school.

"We purposely chose to live by the schools,” Patty Poling said, “which has been like something out of Norman Rockwell, being able to let your kids ride their bike or walk to school. What better place to do it than Marco Island? We were able to do that, and to me that was wonderful. All of them went through Tommie Barfield, and Maggie just finished middle school. So, we had all of them go through Tommie Barfield and the Marco Island Charter Middle School. They go to Lely. I know it’s kind of controversial, but the kids have always gone to Lely."

Bob and Patty Poling met while serving their residencies in Columbus. It was a mutual interest in mountain biking that brought them together. Their first impressions of Marco Island were very positive.

“Very, very welcoming,” Patty Poling recalls. "We worked for the Cleveland Clinic. We started there. It was so much easier for us. There were more programs for kids here. We loved Tommie Barfield. It’s just the joy of letting the kids go to school and come home. There were YMCA programs. First Baptist had an after-school program. You can be outside 365 days a year."

The Polings appreciated Marco’s comprehensive bike path system featuring connected shared use paths, also known as wide sidewalks.

“This is utopia for families,” she said. "There are sidewalks everywhere. We think it’s fantastic. We had this thing where we would walk to dinner. We’d pull the kids along or ride a bike. You teach the children that you don’t have to hop in a car. That’s all you need as a family. You don’t need a lot of other things.”

"My parents, it gave a lot to them,” she continued. “I think a lot of the older generation don’t have their families here. I told my parents they were kind of spoiled. Raising your kids here, I think they see things a little differently. There’s a laid-back attitude here. It’s good living. I think that medicine can be incredibly stressful, so to be able to kick back and relax once in a while is key. The sidewalks, just to have that, to let the kids go with their friends. Go outside and go bike. Go do something outdoors. Have some fun. We don’t have to show you fun, you can do it yourself with your friends. When the dinner bell rings, you come home. Being outside is life extending. Not everybody has the opportunities we have here.”

Rosie Poling has just graduated from Harvard and is getting ready to pursue her master’s degree at the University of Cambridge, informally Cambridge University, in Cambridge, England. University of Cambridge is one of the most prestigious universities in the world.  Patty Poling explains a little about her eldest child who will eventually have graduated from arguably the most prestigious university in the United State and the UK.

“She’s obviously just incredibly smart,” she said. "She perseveres. Works really hard. I think what I’m probably most proud of is that every day of high school she wrote down something she was thankful for. She’s smart and incredibly athletic. A kind person. She was actually able to go back and look at her application to Harvard. She was valedictorian of her class. She’s just a really nice person. She was with (track coaches) Roger Raymond and Mark McGarity. We’re still really close with both of them. When she did well, they were thrilled. When she struggled, they felt bad for her. You can’t ask for better. She’s very into public health. She works with Partners in Health. She does a lot of lobbying. She’ll go down to Washington D.C. and lobby. She is intelligent and works hard and wants to help take care of people.”

“She’s off to Cambridge to get a master's in public health,” Poling says. “It’s hard. You’ve got to find a college that fits you. Harvard doesn’t fit everyone. But for her it was great.”

Rosie was one of the top runners in Collier County while at Lely. She decided to switch gears athletically when she entered Harvard. 

"She switched to crew at Harvard,” Patty Poling said. "She never rowed a boat before she got there. She wasn’t recruited, she walked on. That was hard. But I think she thrives when you give her challenges like that. You’re not going to be number one when you get there, but you push yourself.”

Number two daughter Ellie is also going to study in the northeast. She’s following a similar path to her sister athletically. "Ellie is going to try to do the same thing at Georgetown,” Patty Poling said. "Crew is a great sport. It’s kind of a metaphor for life. You have to work together. It’s all about the challenge."

An accident endured by Ellie early in her elementary school years exemplifies the Poling family unity.

"She was in second grade,” Patty Poling said. "The kids were just out playing on their bicycles as children are supposed to do. I was home. Mickey came in and said, ‘Mom, Ellie fell off of her bicycle.’ I said, ‘O.K.’ He said,’ No, come out. She’s really hurt.’ Well, there was blood everywhere. It was horrible.  She had helmet on. But she flipped over her handlebars and landed on her chin. You could tell immediately she was hurt. She fractured both sides of her jaw. Knocked a tooth out. She had her mouth wired shut for six to eight weeks. She had liquids only. This poor little second grade girl. So, we all did liquids. I said, ‘If you’re around Ellie, you’re doing liquids. If you’re not in her sight, and she can’t see you, you can have solids. We’re in it together. We can do it.' I remember we went to dinner one night, we were celebrating something, and we all ordered soup. It was at a restaurant in Naples. I think the waiter thought we were bizarre. It’s hard to watch your kid not be able to eat anything. But she was a trooper.

Her teacher, Miss Dizio, would keep these little yogurt shakes for her. She was a doll. We had to go once a week, at least, to check her bones. It’s a lot. You’ll do anything for your kids. When she got everything off, they said, ‘You can eat. What are you going to have?’ She was like, ‘I want Cheetos.’”

"Jill Dizio is our neighbor,” Poling said. “This is part of that community. These teachers, how grateful we are for them. They go above and beyond. They don’t need to do some of the things they do. As a parent, to have somebody like that, it’s wonderful. Just wonderful people.”

Mickey Poling is the only boy among the four Poling children.

"Mickey is going to be a junior,” Patty Poling said. "He ran cross country and track. We like to say, to motivate him is to say, ‘You have to do this for the team.’ Not necessarily individual. He’s a musician. His first love is music. He was doing the band and cross country and obviously his school work. Which he can pull off. He absolutely loves music. Lely was perfect for him."

Maggie, the baby of the family, was nurtured by her siblings. “Maggie is probably the most versatile athlete of the kids,” Patty Poling said. "She started out with Rosie coaching her in Optimists. We love the Optimist program. We always told the kids, ‘You will be coaching the younger kids.' Rosie and Mickey were always Maggie’s coach. Soccer, basketball. You can switch around sports. If you didn’t like it the first time, you might like it the second time.

She won the Mickey Mendel scholarship at graduation the other day. She’s a tough little kid. She’s really tough. I think she’s a mixture of all her brothers and sisters. It’s nice because we get to continue on with Lely. We love Lely. It’s been great for our kids. For our kids it’s just what we wanted. It’s going to be a little more challenging. Ellie was valedictorian."

With Rosie setting the bar so high, one might wonder if her younger siblings might feel pressure to live up to her achievements.

“I’d say no,” Patty Poling said. "Because everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses. I don’t know if we’ve seen that. The girls are all four years apart, so they were not in the same school together. So, they weren’t actually there at the same time."  

Rosie Poling is enjoying a little time at home before entering Cambridge University, where she also hopes to continue her athletic pursuits. She reflected back on her time at Harvard.

“I knew I wanted to do a very liberal-artsy-type thing,” she said. "I didn’t just want to do science. I ended up studying the history of science, particularly focusing on the history of medicine. Which was really interesting. Especially in the context of right now with what is happening. How history repeats itself with pandemics. How we got here. What does it look like for a pandemic to end? What does it look like for vaccines? I took a lot of really cool classes. That’s helped prepare me well. The past can really give us some insights into how to move forward. I took organic chemistry and other science classes. I’m super excited to go to the University of Cambridge in the UK for a master’s degree in philosophy. The main subject is medicine, health, and society. It’s a newish degree. I’ll be taking a lot of interdisciplinary courses. I really want to work in health policy. A lot of it is still up in the air. I’d like to work in designing policy and programs to help expand quality healthcare. I’m not sure if that will be with a non-governmental organization or a governmental organization. The CDC or WHO. I’m not really sure exactly what I want to do in the future.”

Rosie thoroughly enjoyed her experiences with the rowing team.

“I was super lucky,” she said. "When I got to Harvard, I met someone there my very first week who was on the rowing team. She was awesome. I decided to walk onto the team. The first year I learned the basics. The second year was very exciting. Our team hadn’t qualified for NCAAs for five years. After my freshman year the whole team decided we wanted to qualify the following year. We decided we were working way too hard not to get there. So, we decided to refocus our training, refocus ourselves. So, we really worked on it over the summer, fall and winter. By the time the spring season came we were doing really well. We ended up qualifying for the NCAA’s, which was an incredible experience. We placed 14th in the NCAA in Division One, which is really exciting. We kind of knew we could do better. So, we started training harder. Then, of course, a week before we were going to start, COVID hit. Then that season was cancelled. And this season Harvard decided not to have any athletics. So, the team is training again now. But it was kind of hard to let go of that. I definitely struggled with it a bit. It’s the teammates I really missed.”

Rosie’s course of study at Harvard was quite relevant to what the world is experiencing right now.

“It was interesting to me because,” Rosie Poling said, "I did my thesis on the 1918 pandemic. And that’s the first year they started the Francis H. Burr ’09 Scholarship. Of course, in 1918 women didn’t really have sports at all. But it was a really great honor to win that award. I’m really grateful to my coaches for nominating me. They taught me how to row. So, they’re a really big reason for my success.”