School equestrian teams

R

rockster

New User
Joined
20 October 2009
Messages
5
Visit site
Hi, I am interested in starting an equestrian team at the secondary school I teach at. Anyone got any ideas about where to start?
confused.gif
 
Have a look at local equestrian centres and see if they run any inter-school events. If you cant find any you might have to contact other schools in your area as well as equestrian centres. I would hold a meeting first though, to make sure there is enough pupils interested to make it work.
 
Have already held a meeting and got at least 10 kids with their own ponies who are interested. Have also got permission from the head, checked out insurance, got an insured and qualified instructor and a venue to train at. Today I sent letters home to parents to check interest, viability and whether anyone wants to help run it.
We have a lot of pretty good little riders at school and I know one other mainstream school in the area competes, tried to contact the person that runs it but to no avail and she's now gone on maternity leave.
Don't want to get the kids hopes up and then let them down but really want to get this off the ground. What could I do next?
 
Hi, I was president of my uni riding club, part of the BUCS league. The competition style is a really good test of alround riding and makes competing really accesible, heres the rules
http://www.bucs.org.uk/sport.asp?section=896&sectionTitle=Equestrian

The good thing is, the point is you don't ride your own horse so you can compete with more people and it's easy to set up a league (we made our own friendly league) It sounds a little compliacated to start but basically
4 people on a team

4 dressage horses/ponies are demonstrated (usually by different people or can be by the home team as long as they don't go onto compete that horse)

Teams draw an order and pick horses so one from each team rides each horse, each horse is then doing the test 4 times.

Tests are marked as usual, then the person with the best score gets zero, then the other 3 get the difference. i.e. best rider gets 56, next gets 60, so they'd get 4 penalties.

Then jumping horses demonstrated, orders drawn again, horses picked.

4 faults for a fence, points added.

We ran a team comp along side the individuals, 3 scores counting, and a drop score. We also kept the fences low and the BUCS test is like nothing BD does, it's very symmetrical and almost reminds me of a working hunter pattern because it just shows all paces on both reins. no lateral work and no collection



We hired out a v good riding school for £300 for four teams to do the comp and have an instructor on hand as it was a friendly. We didn't charge but you could easily make it up, and it's really easy to get other schools involved.

Hope thats of some use!
 
I used to train at my last school- its really hard to organise these events due to transport and vaccination rules etc. The interschools stuff i have done was always over an hour away and so we needed transport- problem was you cant transport friends to comps without insurance so parents couldnt transport other kids' ponies - so whilst you might have 10 interested most important thing is to find out how many of those have transport. You need four in a team and ideally 2 reserves. Our team came 2nd last year but I hd to train them every single thursday for ages to get them decent. Also vaccination- all ponies need full vaccinations- and they must be to the date as we found out last year when one pony was vaccinated 2 days too late and couldnt compete. Make sure all the kids have 3rd part insurance and you need to sent out letters that state you are not responsible for any injury during practice and competition and that it is their responsibility to maintain the horse and riders fitness and equipment.

It is do-able and rewarding and good for CV BUT very time consuming esp at weekends so if you like competing on your own horse you may find yourself giving up the odd weekend to help train the kids or go to local/area/regional comps. Good luck!!!
 
I'm a student, and I've just set up my school's team. Register with the NSEA, and find out what comps are in your area! There's quite a few local leagues, and qualifiers. Think you may have missed the JAS and dressage, but there'll be eventing in spring- for East Anglia it's at Poplar.
 
Thanks for the help and the welcome everyone.
I've got the registration forms from the NSEA but the head wants me to get confirmation from parents that they are willing to do it before we fork out the registration fee, understandable. Hopefully I'll know this when I get the letters back I sent out today.
The idea of the competition you suggested sounds great Bugsey but not sure how that would work out with insurance and liability? Any ideas?
The only other thing about the stuff I found on the NSEA website was that all the events are so far from us. We are in Shropshire, nr Welsh border. I know mainstream schools can compete but travelling that far might be asking a but much.
 
We never paid seperate insurance for BUCS comps as we were on riding school horses, in their arena, so basically it's same as a lesson. Again keeping costs down. I can't thank Urchinwood Manor enough, they were fabulous. And the BD judge we had did it for expenses and a box of choccies! I would probs encourage your members to take out personal liability/rider insurance/BHS membership as you are riding horses you only have 10mins/ 4 practice warm up on a strange horse. I just really liked the format as it meant anyone could do it and it made it cheap and isn't so much hastle for the riding school as they only have to prep 8 horses to have 16 people compete! BUCS has alsorts of stupid extra rules but as you would be independant you could really run with it and make it fab!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top