What's more stressful than finals week?
Home shows.
How often do teenagers coordinate and host horse shows? Now bring in six other competing colleges and get twenty horses ready.
Collegiate horse shows can be much more complicated than your average horse show. One college is hosting the show and provides all the horses to be ridden. The other competing colleges drive, sometimes long hours, to get the the host school. All riders get a random draw and that's the horse they ride. The host school is responsible for having all the horses prepared for the ring. Thats about twenty horses that need to get groomed, tacked up, and walked in the ring, and only a small team to get them there.
It's no surprise that organizing the show begins far in advance. Order ribbons, find a judge, try like hell to get as many volunteers as possible. When the weekend of the show arrives, you better hope you don't have any exams or big assignments due. A few days before the show are designated to making the horses look top notch, setting up the ring, and cleaning the facility. It's incredibly helpful that everyone lives on campus.
When show day arrives, wake up before the crack of dawn, bring in the horses, give them breakfast, and start getting ready. The appearance of those horses directly reflects upon the school and your team. As the show begins, get ready for a whirlwind. No matter how much planning goes in, perfection does not come out. A horse will poop in his tail, a horse will have the wrong saddle, and a horse will be late to the ring. You can't control everything, but it can all be fixed. These corrections are made as rapidly as they come up, and no one sees the hiccups from the outside. Ride after ride, the show goes on. As stressful as the show has been, its time to put on your helmet and compete. In the moments that you're on the horse (which is really only fifteen minutes), the rest of the show stress disappears.
After the lunch break passes by, the show winds down. The rides end and all the teams get packed into their vans. When the individual and team scores are tallied, as the home team, you hope you had a competitive edge. In the end, the ribbons and prizes are handed out, and it doesn't really matter which teams wins. First and foremost, as long as everyone was safe, there were no falls or injuries, it's a good day with horses. When the visitors are on their way home, all that's left to do is clean up.
What's really important here? The team. This is a seriously competitive, collegiate, team sport. The team needs each other to succeed. We need each other to lean on for support, and most of all, we learn from each other. Being a collegiate sport, everyone comes from a different background. We each have something special to bring to the team, and its important that everyone have that opportunity. The greatest part of hosting an intercollegiate horse show is that my team gets to show off what we've learned from a great coach, and we share with each other the sport we all love most.
