USEA Area 1 Town Hall Meeting: September 12, 2026
(GMHA Horse Trials)
Participants: 15-20 people
A mix of professional riders/coaches, young riders, officials, organizers, council members with a few adult amateurs.
Similar themes to Millbrook Town Hall – revolving around accessibility, affordability, and inclusivity of the sport.
- Need to Build our Membership
- Area 1 membership 2024 → 2025 down approximately 6%
- Estimate of active competitors in Area 1 is approximately 300 riders
- Organizers for all horse events (sanctioned, schooling, clinics, etc.) are drawing from every weekend between May and October.
1. Pathways into the sport?
- Traditionally – family, fox hunting, pony club, lesson barns, working off riding lessons
- Currently – Similar (list below), but with significant decreases in number of lesson barns & major decline in Pony Club and fox hunting:
- Lesson programs
- Ponies (often hunter/equitation) – programs that have solid building blocks for riding & horsemanship
- Pipeline from other local barns that teach basics but before specialization & before leasing or buying a horse
- For Adult Amateurs – buying and/or leasing a horse
- Barn work
- Pony Club
- Lesson programs
- Do hunter jumpers have the same problem? In some cases, yes, but access to horses appears to be easier:
- Leasing options
- More money
- Similar to eventing – there are less lesson programs
2. Lowering Barriers to Entry
- Can we acquire/keep school horses or other ways to “provide” access to experienced, safe horses?
- GMHA Horses – GMHA noted that they are looking into getting educational grants and being able to have school horses.
- Are there GRANTS for lesson barns and acquiring horses?
- Is there a network that we could build that would allow people that have good horses but due to life changes require them to find good temporary &/or permanent ownership & care for these
horses? - Coaches & trainers at meeting have very, very few lesson horses and most say their business cannot support the cost of keeping them.
- Calendar and Schedule
- Calendar impacts entries as there are a finite number of active riders with multiple choices every weekend.
- Upper levels & FEI schedule can impact coaches/trainers and therefore influence/affect lower-level entry choices.
- What is the incentive to enter a Sanctioned vs. a schooling H-T?
- Peer pressure (what those around you are doing)
- Personal Goal (feeling of achievement)
- Doing well, why not?
- Sales program (generates/drives interest from potential buyers)
3. How do we grow Membership?
- Introduce more people to the sport & provide friendly, low stress ways to experience the sport:
- Consider an overall, multi-faceted marketing campaign for the sport utilizing “big” events, local events, non-eventing horse events to build awareness & encourage invitation.
- Greater addition and promotion of CTs and add-on divisions to sanctioned and schooling horse trials.
- Intro & Starter division promotion
- Free clinics – Intro to Eventing to go over the basics – what it is, what to expect, how to get started.
- How can we promote Eventing better?
- Think outside the box
- Do an educational day before shows
- Hunters no matter what age, there’s a level/division for everyone
