“I Was And Am Still An Agent For Change”

In 1997, Alan Balch took over as president of the then American Horse Shows Association, and in his first speech he outlined numerous far-reaching proposals for change. A year later, the Chronicle gave him the opportunity to explain his often controversial plans and goals in detail. Balch’s term ended Dec. 1 with the formation of the new U.S. Equestrian Federation. At the new organization’s convention last month, Balch sat down to reflect on how he has and hasn’t changed the sport’s administration.

John Strassburger: You’ve often expressed that one of your guiding principles or goals was inclusion or openness. But you admitted when we talked in 1998 that the federation’s members, as you said then, “just don’t have a lot of practice disagreeing in the open.” Do you think they’ve gotten any better at it and if so, what has that accomplished for the organization?

Alan Balch: It’s a double-edged sword. Yes, I think we’ve gotten somewhat better at it, but I see a lot of signs of what some people have said to me is “too much democracy.” But I almost find it laughable because this is about as far from an extremely democratic sport and organization as you can get. It’s been opened up somewhat, and I hope it doesn’t go the other way, at least not too far. I see some risk or danger that it might’more closed meetings, but they have a place. One of the main things that I’ve learned about the so-called too-much-democracy point of view is that when everything is in the open, people tend to posture, and sometimes their posturing is not with the best of motive. It is entirely possible that I’ve been for too much openness because it doesn’t bother me. I think that there needs to be a healthy balance there. I don’t know quite where it is; I don’t know that anyone knows.

Not everything is going to be unanimous, but what I think we still need some more practice at is: OK, a vote was taken, the matter was considered, now we go on to the next. We do have certain elements in the sport who absolutely will not receive the will of the majority in good grace and go on. They just want to keep re-visiting the situations over and over again.

Strassburger: The conflict between the federation and the U.S. Equestrian Team obviously consumed a great deal of your time and your mental capital, as well as the federation’s time and money. And some people believe that even if you didn’t start the war, it was a personal conflict between you and certain USET leaders, a conflict that kept it from being solved until last year. Was it a personal conflict from your point of view? And looking back to the early days in 1997 when it began, would you have done anything differently?

Balch: I have never considered it a personal conflict, and maybe that’s because I’m on the receiving end of all the personalization. I think it was a clash in principles. And the principles take the form of the people who advocate the principles. I was and am still an agent for change. But it’s very, very clear to me that however much these various different points of view have been expressed by individual people, 99 percent of this has been a clash over principles and methodology, and that’s why they’ve been taken so seriously. I just know that we did everything absolutely according to process and to the law, and the record is very clear for all to see.

It always bothers me when people say, “Oh, I wouldn’t change a thing.” Well, anybody who says they wouldn’t change a thing means they would never benefit by hindsight. If I knew then what I know now, I can’t even begin to tell you all  the things that I would have done differently. But we didn’t know things then that we know now. As far as enumerating what I would have done differently, that’s an impossible question to answer because we didn’t know. We didn’t know what, we didn’t know why, we were told certain things that turned out not to be the case. I know that we, the leadership’and it wasn’t just me, it was our officers and Executive Committee and board’ considerd every single nuance and issue that arose was decided on an inclusive basis.

 I remember people telling me in ’96 and ’97 that the AHSA was irrelevant, people didn’t care, so nobody went to the convention. If there’s one thing that the last several years have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s that governance is relevant to the sport. There were very legitimate differences of opinion, cultural differences, philosophical differences, and geographical differences, and they all seemed to be expressed in that one challenge. Again, if you go back to the definition of governance, which is guidance, it makes sense.

Strassburger: You’ve often talked and written about your vision of the federation being an all-inclusive organization serving equestrians from the beginning levels of participation all the way to the Olympics. As I recall, “Every step of the way” was the slogan. Do you think that the new U.S. Equestrian Federation fulfills this model, this vision that you had?

Balch: Well, let me put it this way, it has a framework for fulfillment, and I think that’s great. But, this is still a hot-button issue. And it exists in every sport, because the Olympic movement is always defined in terms of elite and non-elite. Those of us who are clearly non-elite, like me, know we’re non-elite, and we don’t have any aspirations to be elite. But we love to be in the sport that has elite and to be able to rub shoulders with a David O’Connor. The problem, of course, comes in what I would call the aspiring segment because at some point in everybody’s life, even mine way back, the thought occurs to you that “maybe I could do that.” We want to keep that alive, and that’s why the non-elite or the grassroots or the hobby riders are an extremely important component of any sport. I think most of the elite accomplished riders recognize that, because most of them have long memories of where they came from and when they first had the dream. We need to keep that alive, and David, I believe, endorses that philosophy. But some don’t. But now we have a framework for inclusion and for giving the non-elite and aspiring a dream and a ladder to get there.

Strassburger: When you came into office, you planned to address the mileage rule and show ratings, suggesting then that the time had come to remove the protection of the mileage rule and to let the market rule. But the show ratings system has been modified only slightly since then. And we still have basically the same mileage rule, which David has now made a priority to address. What happened?

Balch: I think it’s in the framing of the question. And I think David took a very good step toward changing the way the question was framed when he addressed the issue [in his keynote address at the convention]. Mileage rule versus no mileage rule’that’s one way of framing the question. But it tends to ignore the 180 degrees that’s between the current mileage rule and “letting the market rule.” This is a matter of order in the sport, of calendar coordination to eliminate conflicts and to optimize competition.

Let’s remember that we are a sport. We’re not selling hamburgers, to use the example people so-called complete free-marketers use. There isn’t a McDonald’s on every corner, because McDonald’s is a franchised operation and there are market areas. But there might be a Burger King across the street. We are not in that type of a business. We’re a not-for-profit organization that exists to guide a sport, and a sport depends on optimizing competition. I don’t know of any sport that doesn’t have some method of coordinating and ordering the calendar so that it leads to optimizing competition. Ultimately we need to have a system that at certain points provides for the best meeting the best in competition. Having said all that, when there’s any regulation of something like a calendar the regulation tends to be some number of years behind the growth. That’s where we are now, in my opinion. And from what David has said, it sounds like it’s his opinion too.

I held a summit meeting on this issue in May 1997, and where we failed was that first things had to come first. Once the USET challenge began to bubble, it was very clear that the mileage situation was part and parcel of the responsibility of the national governing body. The mileage rule and the method of calendar organization is a key part of governance. It varies discipline to discipline, so there has to be a method of doing this that serves the overall interest of the sport. Until the leadership of the sport was settled, we couldn’t really make any effective steps on the mileage rule, so quite properly David has put that at the top of his agenda.

Strassburger: Recording the pedigree and performance of competing horses was another early and often-stated goal. There is now a horse sports database, but it took four years to get there and there’s still confusion and even disappointment among some members and some of the affiliates about it. Why did it take so long to arrive here, and how could or should it work better?

Balch: It took so long to arrive because, once [Executive Director] Kate Jackson, [Treasurer] Kathy Meyer and I had done a thorough audit of our financial situation and the overall picture of the association in the first year, 1997, we realized that first things had to come first. This was even before the [USET challenge] had started to bubble too much. We looked at our New York leases and when things were going to expire, and the state of our technology in the office in New York and realized, “Whoa, in order to make the investment in technology, we have to reallocate resources.” And the only way we were going to have enough resources to be able to tackle the technology problem was to move out of New York City and take those gigantic resources previously devoted to rents and associated overheads and get them redirected to staff, services, technology and so forth.

The reason [the database] took so long was that the move superceded it. Then, having accomplished the move, we had to get into the technology. In the meantime, the individual affiliates, particularly dressage and eventing and to some extent the breed registries, were already ahead of us in technology because they’d applied at least some level of technology to keep track of their horses. And they considered it to some extent proprietary. The problem that still remains to be resolved is how we can coordinate this all so everyone’s prerogatives as to their data and their methodologies are maintained or protected, not threatened, and work for the overall good of the whole. This is a really, really tough nut, but it’s going to be cracked, and it’s going to work.

Strassburger: It’s hard to believe now that there was such a vocal opposition to the move from a minority of the membership. I think we can all agree that it was accomplished unbelievably smoothly and efficiently. Did it achieve the cost saving benefits you anticipated? What other benefits did it bring to the federation and its members?

Balch: I think the move was an unqualified success. I’ve heard some people say, “Oh, well it didn’t achieve this, that or the other cost savings.” Well, you don’t see the cost savings because what I came to say instead of “savings” was “reallocation of resources.” What it enabled us to do was to take those previous resources for rents and reallocate them into additional staff and, particularly, additional technology. So you don’t see the “savings,” except by comparing it to where we would have been if we hadn’t done it.

Sure there are downsides. The labor market in Kentucky is not as expansive as we thought. The reason is, of course, because there are lots of outdoor, hands-on, I-work-directly-with-horses jobs. That’s been to some extent a disappointment. We have a superb staff’don’t get me wrong’but some of us harbored the illusion that we’d have people lining up at our door, just desperate to work for the federation. That has proven not to be the case. Recruiting is still difficult. But certainly as far as employee morale and employee relationships and employee relationships with the members, it’s far better because nobody has to have an hour-and-a-half commute in and out of New York City.

Strassburger: The National Hunter Jumper Council was part of the AHSA’s restructuring to become a more complete umbrella organization. But it has been completely dissolved. Why didn’t it ever achieve independence from the federation and why didn’t it work?

Balch: I firmly believe it was because an FEI discipline’ jumpers’was part of it and because it had such a big component of show management leading it. These factors that we’ve already talked about got wrapped up in it’the governance struggle, the mileage rule and prerogatives of management. Once things like that get politicized, it almost gets to be a hopeless case because of those other complications, agendas of individuals rather than agendas of the whole sport. I know people say I have my own agendas. Well, sure, I have agendas, but my agendas were all out there for everyone to see. Who knows what some of the other agendas were? Finally, about a year ago, we made the decision to cut our losses. We’ve got to go back to square one and get the hunter constituency and the jumper constituency properly represented and then let nature take its course.

As David has properly stated, we need a blueprint. What should an affiliate be? It’s like we have the cart before the horse. Let’s get an overall picture and define the parameters of what an affiliate ought to do and how it ought to be formed, and then it will become clearer.

We on the Planning Committee felt that everybody shared the vision of an independent affiliate and how it was going to evolve. And whether we didn’t communicate well or we just didn’t understand as well as we should have the complexities of the hunters and jumpers I’m not sure, but we tried to impose this structure onto a couple of disciplines. We thought it ought to work; it seemed to make sense on paper, but it didn’t work. It’s one thing to design something conceptually, and it’s something else to have it really work. I think the new leadership is going about this the right way now.

Strassburger: In the early years of your administration, the drug rule consumed a lot of attention. In fact, the 1998 convention was nearly overwhelmed by the debate on the drug rule. I would presume you see the effort you and your administration took in this area as a major step in another of your themes, protecting the welfare of the horse. What else did your administration accomplish in this area? And looking back on the drug rule and what you did, were you satisfied or pleased with how it came out?

Balch: I am really pleased that it doesn’t appear to me as though the drugs and medications program was a casualty of the governance struggle’because there was consensus’everywhere’that we need a strong drugs and medications program and rule. Now, we’re a long way from perfection, and I think the drugs and medications people would agree with that. We need a lot more investment in drugs and medication, we need a lot more testing, we need expansion of the program, we need a lot more research and development.

I think that [protecting the horse] has moved to the hearing committee in the regulation process which is really not an accomplishment, it’s just the surfacing of the issue. I think there is so much misunderstanding out there. It is very disturbing to me that so few of our top professionals’and not just the professionals’do not understand how the hearing process works and how insulated from politics it is and must always be’totally independent. There are people who think that I, or whoever the president is, have something to do with determining drug positives or prosecuting cases, and that has to be addressed. In this new, consolidated confederation, that is a real danger. One of the things that worked well in the old structure was that you had one side that was a fund-raising organization [the USET] and the other side that was the enforcement organization [AHSA/USAEq]. And now that we’re in one combined organization, it has to be made crystal clear to everyone that the directors and the leadership have absolutely nothing to do with drug testing or the hearing procedure. It’s an entirely independent process, and we have to do a much better job of education on that.

Strassburger: Are there any other programs, policies or accomplishments that your administration succeeded in doing that we haven’t discussed?

Balch: We could sit here a long time and talk about details, but you’ve certainly covered the highlights’the leadership issues, the governance issues and the marketing issues. I guess I would like to mention one other thing, and that is the finances. Through Kathy Meyer and the Planning Committee’s original fee-for-service model, the financial reporting and accountability and cost-controlling’to some extent part of the technology issue too’is so much more advanced than it was seven years ago. I can’t even begin to tell you how proud I am of that. I am so pleased with the staff progress in that. We were flying so blind in 1997, and it was so difficult to understand where we were financially. There was a lot of resistance from staff at first. I wanted reports because I was accustomed to seeing every nickel bet at Santa Anita [Racetrack in California] on a daily basis. I used to get reports there, and I was the marketing guy, I wasn’t the finance guy. That was our Bible. We needed to see every aspect of statistical information. You can’t manage something well without statistical data and, particularly, financial data.

There was resistance at first in how we wanted to track the cash and how we wanted to track the income categories and how we wanted to interface it with the general ledger, and how we wanted to interface it with the statistics coming from the competitions. It sounds like I’m taking credit for it, but I just demanded it. The staff had to do it. They had to develop these reports. I think the staff should be really proud of that, and the members should be proud of knowing that a businesslike approach has been brought to that.

Strassburger: Finally, what is Alan Balch going to do now?

Balch: Sleep in every morning. I like to sleep’I really do. Seriously, I’m not going to do too much. I don’t own any horses now, and I haven’t for a few years. I have been working on this stuff 24/7, almost literally, and I’m looking forward to other things in life.