Are there any riders out there that rode on a high school riding team?! No? Okay, I shall tell you about it.
My junior year of high school, I started to ride on an IEA team. IEA means Interscholastic Equestrian Association. Riding teams are made up of middle school and high school students. Clusters of a few states in the US are put into certain zones like New England is Zone 1 which was the zone I was part of when I was on the team. They have 3 disciplines which are Hunt Seat, Western and Saddle Seat; I rode Hunt Seat. It is quite a challenge when riding on an IEA team because in every lesson, you must ride a different horse in order to become used to riding your anonymous horse at the next show. Sometimes during lessons, we would ride a horse for half the lesson then switch with another student. At every show, a barn hosts the show and uses its own horses for the classes and sometimes they will ask local barns near them if they could borrow a few horses. You would gather with your other class riders and randomly choose a horses name. At Regionals, I chose my horse by choosing a rubber ducky which had the horses name on the bottom. The shows went from local shows, to Regionals, to Zones and then to Nationals. I tried my hardest at Regionals and earned my way to Zones! I got a champion blue ribbon and a silver plate (fancy...). Haha, but at Zones, I was a bit weak because I rode a fairly stocky horse which earned me a 6th place ribbon but it was lesson to be learned that I must ride many different horses in order to be able to ride a random horse at a show.
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| Off To Zones! |
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| No Nationals, but I did great! |
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| Zones! |
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| Waiting... |
Photo credits to my mom
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