By PIPER KLEMM
This past summer I started asking every trainer I know who brings people to their first rated shows what the barriers are. Over and over I heard the same things. There was little to no mention of riding challenges. The memberships, the cost, and confusion over paperwork were both intimidating and deterring for so many people. As a trainer it is hard to sell the value of US Equestrian. And it is apparently much more difficult for the governing body to sell their own value, as they seemingly have always relied on trainers to provide that emotional labor to grow their organization for free.
After a summer of interviews, many I spoke to found it especially tone deaf when the governing body announced their rate increases last fall. While a $80 or $100 membership should be attainable for most people in our sphere, when you ask even people paying for this membership, they are unsure what they are paying for. It is hard for trainers to sell something that is not good value. And when people already don’t find membership “worth it,” raising rates—something that is always unpopular—quickly becomes very unpopular.
Looking through even my own records, it’s not hard to find that their (lack of) control on their own data is not serving our horses. Which trainers are keeping horses going for a long time, and which trainers seem to have a lot of horses catastrophically fail in their barns? Unclear. Which horse shows do horses compete at and then not show for a while? Unclear. How many duplicate registrations do we see? Many. Which stallions are producing winners? With their inability to link information, it’s not really clear with current information, and information requests are met with excuses that they do not have the ability to update it quickly. Good data is as much about what you don’t have as about what you have. Records for humans and horses need to be clean, clear, and accurate to be effective.
The records, like the rules, do not hold up to the smallest amount of scrutiny. You literally cannot spend an hour on their website without finding at least a dozen clerical errors. With so many errors, it can be hypothesized that either their expensive and home-built data is ineffective, too complicated, or not monitored and cleaned by a staff who is given the time and space to believe in a vision of accuracy. At this year’s annual meeting, we learned that staff compensation, benefits, and payroll taxes made up 36% of the annual budget, likely into the eight figures. Administration & Operations were another 38%, which included Member Services, IT & Facilities, and Horse & Athlete Services. Rounding out the last 26% was National Breed & Discipline Programs, International Discipline Programs and FEI Passthrough.
But when you consider the implications, US Equestrian doesn’t use bureaucracy as a way to organize or to help horses or people. Our governing body uses bureaucracy as a form of control. Instead of clear standards and educational and forward-thinking values, it feels like fear is encouraged by them never actually telling you what the rules are and aren’t. In all the made-up and nonsensical parts of submitting horse paperwork, it seems like they’re not telling you the rules because they want you to mess up. They want to have control of a system so bureaucratic that there is no right and wrong.
Potentially the most concerning part of this evolved system is how acceptable it has become to so many—the horse show managers, organizers, app developers, owners, trainers, and competitors who all put up with incorrect records, fines, misinformation, lack of verification, and seemingly no standards. Despite these constraints, we have managers trying to put on the best horse show they possibly can. We have app developers trying to make heads or tails and systematize, and we blame them when the apps are just too complicated. We have braiders, grooms, and trainers all revolving their lives around an increasingly complex system. We have equestrian businesses of all forms and sizes hiring additional people simply to manage paperwork and compliance.
Does hiring extra people to serve compliance make your horses’ lives better? No, it simply makes our sport more expensive. When we come back to the facts, what’s making the sport so expensive is our governing body. With every person a horse show needs to hire, that cost is passed down to the exhibitors. Every horse who needs to show to get mileage becomes more expensive when horses are already more expensive. Every time we are missing people in the educational process, the well dries up, and those still able to find help are able to pay a premium and allow costs to be driven up.
The way we make our sport affordable is to have a governing body who controls us by quality leadership, trust, and the fundamental value that our sport is for everyone, not just the few. The belief that our sport should be easy to get into and hard at the top. A leadership who elevates horse welfare through systems that promote and benefit horses and the humans that care for them, not more nebulous rules that serve to exert authority by confrontation rather than culture. A membership controlled by bureaucracy is expensive, alienating, and quite simply not fun.
A sport for everyone invests significant sums of money into grassroots and new rider. The excuse that the federation lacks the funds seems simply invalid in the face of the brand new US Open program last year, that is only more misunderstood than it is pointless to the average member. Is the purpose of this focus on complication meant to further our collective lack of understanding of the sport and what is important?
When you are doing your entries and forms for your next show, ask yourself honestly, in your frustration, how duplicate records from USEF and USHJA really help us. How highly complicated systems grow our sport. How people in charge seem detached from the accuracy of the data they demand. How they continue to raise their prices without improving their product.
I believe in education, and I believe in the optimism of education. I believe in a meritocracy where people can achieve beyond the station they are born into. I believe in opportunity. And I truly believe that with just a couple of new leaders who share forward-thinking values with the majority of the membership, USEF can be that organization for us and let us all spend a few more days per year with our horses instead of being frustrated on our computers and on helplines.
Now is the time to reform USEF data practices!
