Out there on the interwebs this month were three Facebook posts that caught my eye. One was on a sales group for dressage horses, where someone called trainers to task: “What is it with trainers these days? Particularly in the USA,” she wrote. “How come no one is willing to put in the effort to help develop a good horse, and instead they just expect their clients to have the budgets to go and buy the finished product? I know there are a handful of good trainers that don’t get the recognition they deserve but it seems the majority aren’t willing to put the work in. Thoughts?” The replies were thoughtful, bringing a range of experiences to the table.

The second was from a Dressage-News.com article that quoted former team coach and Olympian Debbie McDonald saying, “I think we need more people able to bring along young horses with people who are willing to support them to do that.”

And the third was a Facebook post by six-time Olympian and former team coach Robert Dover, lamenting a lack of ownership support for international horses grown here in the U.S.

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It’s a time of year when the horse job market is flooded with new graduates, both high schoolers not advancing on to college or those taking a gap year, and college grads, some from equine studies-adjacent programs, some not. We professionals in the equine business need support staff, whether it’s grooms or working students or vet techs or farrier’s assistants. There’s no barn-to-barn consistency in what one of those positions looks like, in the same way that being a server at TGI Fridays and a server at the nicest restaurant in Manhattan aren’t the same type of position. And with barns, just like restaurants, there are great ones and there are crappy ones, run by great people, run by crappy people.

I am so, so grateful to not be amongst the barns out there hiring right now (she says as she knocks wood and crosses her fingers and prays to whatever deity needs prayer to keep the team I have). The pandemic and its resulting economic strangeness have left the hiring market in the horse world a wild place. Inflation is making it harder and harder to keep up with wages. I’ve raised board five times in four years just to keep up with both increased costs on my end and also in trying to provide my employees with a wage that made it possible for them to live in a more expensive world. It’s tough, for a lot of people. I don’t have to tell you all this.

And listen, young and horsey, I see them too: the posts on the equine employment groups on Facebook that are offering unpaid positions with shady housing and long hours, touting “I will teach you the ways of the industry and provide invaluable experience” from people with boarding barns or low-level training jobs. If you think it sounds like one step above slave labor, it probably is.

With that said, somewhere behind the naiveté of my fellow Millennials who were told we could be anything we wanted to be—as long as we were willing to take on tens of thousands of dollars of student loans—only to have three epic financial crises in our lifetimes, and the Gen Z “tear it all down” approach to capitalism are a whole bunch of people who love horses and just want to make it all work. There’s gotta be a middle ground.

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Tjornelys Solution DWB—”Beaker,” in the barn—is one of the best talents of my career. Owned by Clearwater Farm Partners, he’s 6 years old, and came into my life in February of this year with a stellar pre-purchase exam, three exquisite gaits, a clear understanding of the connection from leg to seat to hand, and a clean flying change. The FEI 6-Year-Old test is roughly equivalent to third level, calling for collection, flying changes, the third level lateral work of shoulder-in and half-pass.

It was tempting to make that level a priority. He finds the work so, so easy. He is a lovely character, a happy little trier, approaching each day with a smile on his face. He deals well with pressure. And he certainly has the gaits to compete.

There’s also the minor detail that I’m in baby horse purgatory right now. With all of my last round of homemade FEI horses on to other paths, I’m starting anew. And I found myself at a show recently, warming Beaker up for first level, test 3, in the warm-up arena next to the CDI arena, thinking wistfully of how I could be on that side of the perimeter fence.

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A million years ago, in a time of much healthier knees, I did triathlons. If you’ve never stood next to me, I’m 5’10” and built like a refrigerator, so when I tell you I did triathlons, I did them slowly, and I did the shortest distance class: a sprint, which is usually about a half-mile swim, 15-mile bike, and 3.1-mile run. I could do one in about two hours. Competition in these things is often by age group, but because I’m no pixie, I competed in something called the Athena division, for female athletes over 165 pounds. (Lest you were curious, the men’s division, for athletes over 200 pounds, is called the Clydesdale division.)

When you go to a local sprint-distance triathlon, you see all shapes and sizes. You see weekend warriors like me. You see the more ambitious amateur athletes, really going for it. And you’ll often see a few pros that are doing a little sprint to stay sharp, or begin a season, or test the waters recovering from an injury, or maybe just there to inspire their local triathlon club. There are prizes, pizza and beer at the end. It is an absolute hoot.

One of the many things I love about dressage is what I loved about local sprint-distance triathlons: There’s a level, and a competition, for everyone.

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Cadeau, my top horse, has weird feet. They’re small and a little upright, and like everything that comes from Europe, he struggled a bit to adjust to the concrete block that is the ground in a Virginia summer. One of the 10 million reasons I use my excellent farrier Sean Crocker is because he believes in the team approach: He listens to my also-excellent sports medicine veterinarian Dr. Cricket Russillo, and he listens to me when I tell him how the horses are going.

So when he said to me, “Sprieser, Cadeau’s feet are making me nervous, and I want to make sure I’m doing the best for him. Can we get a consult in Wellington with one of the best farriers on the planet?” of course I agreed.

I grew up far away from the equestrian centers of our country, finding my love for horses at local barns and then graduating to competing at the national levels. But I left for a reason, and that reason was that international-caliber training and horse management was much harder to find there. Going to college on the East Coast and spending time in elite-level barns there blew my young mind, because I didn’t even know how little I knew.

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Sometimes my team and I are really rolling, with lots of horses and humans showing and getting somewhere and grinding it out. Other times, the youngsters are all youngstering, and I didn’t book a lot of clinics in January and February because the weather usually stinks, and we’re mostly just logging miles and waiting for something to happen. This is one of those times. But it’s meant that I’ve had time—time to go and watch the warmup at the CDIs, time to get caught up on office work, and time to do some continuing education.

One of those opportunities was Lendon Gray’s Training4Teaching program, which offers free lectures by extremely credentialed people about teaching riders, a topic we don’t talk enough about in dressage. (We say lots about horse training, but not enough about human training.) In addition to some great pearls of wisdom from a whole panel of excellent instructors, Lendon also assigned us some homework: to develop a “Rider Training Scale” to mirror that which already exists for training the horse.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!