At the USEA’s annual convention in Phoenix last month, Sara Ike gave a presentation as part of the USEF’s rider development open forum. Sara is the managing director of eventing for the USEF and you might recognize reading her name most recently from the helmet symposium last weekend. As I wrote during the convention, Sara’s development presentation was entertaining and insightful, and the open forum that followed led to some good discussion. The theme from the meeting was that the basic skeleton of a good rider development program is in place, but we need to improve communication and programs at all levels.
The above image is my favorite slide from Sara’s Powerpont presentation. As the slide points out, the good news is that we have many sources of excellent talent here in the US, but these sources are unorganized and uncoordinated. One big question that needs to be addressed is what about the riders out there who are extremely talented but haven’t found their way into one of these sources that feed into the pipeline? Surely there are brilliant riders out there who aren’t with a big name trainer, haven’t found the right horse yet, and aren’t competing at a high enough level to be discovered by the Developing Riders program. In other words, we need to make sure that the “comes from left field program” catches as many good young riders as possible, and then we need to help those riders get plugged into a good development program. Go eventing.
