Horsing around: An afternoon with the Wash. U. equestrian club

Jon Lewis | Senior Sports Editor

Baskin Farms is about half an hour west of Washington University. It sits on top of a hill in Glencoe, Mo., which is officially an unincorporated community of homes just outside Eureka, home to Six Flags St. Louis. Just about every day of the week, groups of two to four Wash. U. students pile into their cars and head west on I-64, because Baskin Farms is also the home of the Wash. U. equestrian club.

Equestrian is a sport that many students are probably unaware of. At best, they are only reminded of its existence every four years, when horses dance, trot and jump across their television screens during the Summer Olympics. Believe it or not, equestrian exists outside of the realm of the Olympics, and functions as an athletic, social and intellectual outlet for a small, but dedicated group of Wash. U. students.

Freshman Emme Wiederhold of the Washington University equestrian team warms up with her horse during one of the team’s practices. There are 45 members, including graduate students, currently involved with the team, which practices at Baskin Farms in Glencoe, Mo. Sy-Wei Ho | Student Life

Freshman Emme Wiederhold of the Washington University equestrian team warms up with her horse during one of the team’s practices. There are 45 members, including graduate students, currently involved with the team, which practices at Baskin Farms in Glencoe, Mo.

Senior Emma Milford is the president of the club. She organizes various lesson groups for riders of various skill and experience levels. Including graduate students, there are 45 people involved it the club, and they make the trek to Baskin Farms at various times throughout the week, based on their lesson group. Because not everyone has been riding for their whole lives, the members are broken up into groups based on their level of riding experience. While there are certainly members who pick up equestrian at Wash. U., it takes time to learn how to ride a horse.

“Most people who ride with us didn’t start here,” Milford said.

The lesson is the basic unit of equestrian practice. In and of itself, it’s only about an hour long, but the process is much longer than that. The members arrive around an hour before their lessons, where they walk into the stable and check a whiteboard on the back wall to see which horse they will be riding on that day. Though this seems like it might make things more difficult, it serves a real purpose, because the team doesn’t actually ride the horses from Baskin’s stables at competitions.

“Basically the way competitions work is we bring riders from our team to another barn, and we pick a name out of a hat, and we ride whatever horse that is,” Milford said.

At any given competition, then, the riders are likely dealing with a horse they have never met before, often with minimal information at best.

“I always seem to pick the worst horse,” junior Jily Lyle, who, along with Milford and sophomore Katy Brainerd rides in Friday afternoon’s advanced lessons, joked.

The others laugh about their bad luck with the draw, with Milford and Brainerd offering a few examples of the brief descriptions that the riders get before mounting the horses for the first time at competitions: “Pearl will only give you as much as you ask of her,” “Kind of slow,” “Might stop at a jump” or, most confusingly, “Good luck.”

On lesson days, once the riders have seen their assignments, they begin preparing the horses in a procedure known as tacking. Tacking involves getting the saddle, the bridle and all of the other equipment onto the horse.

I arrived at the barn just as the first group of the day, an intermediate group including freshmen Mea Akey and Emme Wiederhold and senior Brennan Durr, was finishing up with the process. Tacking is time-intensive, typically taking almost an hour from start to finish; so by the time I got there, the riders were ready to move onto the lesson itself. Once they were done tacking, they led their horses out of the large door of the stable, down a dirt road and into the barn.

The barn is large, maybe the size of one-and-a-half basketball courts, and smells overwhelmingly of sawdust. The entire floor of the riding area is covered in wood shavings, and there is a separate viewing area with sets of wooden benches. There are overhead leads, but it is still noticeably darker than outside. There are several gates, fences and jumps scattered throughout the riding area for the horses to eventually go around and over.

The lesson mostly includes going in circles. It is more complicated than that, of course, but at its core, an equestrian lesson is riding a horse around in a circle, while a coach in the center of the barn calls out feedback and instruction. The women of the intermediate group start with slow circles, adapting to how their horses respond. The turns are the most difficult part, as one of the horses will occasionally veer off towards the middle of the barn, and its rider will have to circle back and get on track again.

After a few simple laps around the outside of the track, the riders gather in the middle, and the bar is raised, in a very literal sense. The coach walks around to a pair of posts and props up two long wooden poles, which form an “X” that the horses will have to go over. She then gives the riders instructions for which direction to take the course, and off they go, each rider taking on the course one at a time. As they ride through the course, the coach continues

to give advice, mostly on form, calling out things like “Keep your fingers close so he doesn’t ride up,” or explaining why a turn didn’t go so well: “You took your shoulder forward and took your leg off.”

Eventually, the intermediate group’s hour is up, and they file out. The advanced group, which had already arrived in preparation for their time slot, gets started. Like the intermediate group, they also begin by taking their horses on a few laps around the outside. It’s a standard warm-up analogous to running around the field for a bit before a soccer practice.

The advanced group, however, moves much more quickly past the warm-up and onto the more involved laps around the course that involve the fences and the jumps. They also get less feedback on their own form, and more horse-specific coaching. They have slightly more experience than the last group, so the challenge for them is mostly tailoring that experience to the specific challenge of the horse at hand.

After the lessons, the horses are taken for a brief walk to calm down, and then the process of untacking begins. This involves scraping out the dirt and sawdust that gets stuck in the horses’ shoes, taking off all the riding equipment—known as tack—and giving the horse a bath. The horses seem to enjoy this last part.

This seems like a lot of attention to detail concerning the horses, and it is, but that is also the point for many of the members of the equestrian club.

“Usually it starts out with little kids who love horses,” says Brainerd, “And then their parents think, ‘Oh, we’ll do a couple lessons,’ and a decade later you’ll still be going.”

The members of the club, almost without exception, have all been around and loved horses from a very young age. Brainerd started riding as a young girl “as a family thing”—her father and grandparents all also ride. Milford and Lyle both picked up the sport when they were five years old.

It was a similar story for Akey and Durr. Durr grew up taking lessons and riding horses, while Akey was first exposed to the animals because her grandparents owned Shetland ponies when she was a child.

“Once you fall in love with ponies, you have to keep going,” she said.

And keep going they do, despite all the other time commitments and obligations of a Wash. U. student.

“It’s harder in college,” Durr said.

Between the commute, the preparation and the cleanup, an equestrian lesson takes at least four hours out of the day. The members of the club nonetheless carve out time in their weeks, and some members find enough time to travel to shows. Eighteen members of the club form a competitive Hunt Seat team, which throughout the year travels to six shows hosted at Truman State University, Missouri State University and Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The competitive season just wrapped up a month ago, and Wash. U. finished fifth out of 12 teams in the region—which Milford says is fairly impressive considering the team skipped one of the shows in the fall because of the presidential debate.

The regional competition feeds into larger zones, and then eventually to nationals, held in early May in Lexington, Ky. Though the entire team will not be traveling to nationals, Milford will, after qualifying for the Teresa L. McDonald Intercollegiate Horse Shows Association Scholarship Challenge finals and equine care competition. After getting the top score in her zone on the written qualifier, Milford will compete in a practical assessment about horse care, horse nutrition and parts of the horse.

“A lot of it is just knowledge I’ve built up over the years,” Milford said. “I know I’m going to keep riding for the rest of my life; so it’s important to me that I know these things.”

Regardless of the time commitment, Emma and the other members of Wash. U. equestrian are more than happy to make the trip over to Baskin Farms.

“I love being in this place,” Milford said. “It’s just a very calm place for me. You might not always get the calmest ride [but] it’s a very focused environment where you literally can’t be thinking about anything besides listening and communicating with the horse that you’re with.”

And when you get down to it, it really is all about the horses. Being around the animals, for Milford, is more than worth the trouble.

“It’s very soothing,” she said, poking Shazam, the horse she’s untacking, on the nose. “Animals are fun.”

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