First, I love designing courses. I loved it when I first started, and I love it just as much today. Nothing utilizes everything one has learned about horses, riders and the sport in its entirety as much as
designing courses. It’s a combination of horsemanship, artistry, engineering, plus the logistics of dealing with time schedules, management and your helpers in the arena.

And there’s always the occasional crisis to keep life interesting.

No competition is the same; I’ve worked in tiny indoor arenas and huge outdoor stadiums over the years. People have asked me if I don’t simply re-use courses from other shows. The answer is no.

While I’ve always kept my old course plan—easier in the age of the computer than when file cabinets of paper seemed to fill up overnight—I rarely use a plan from the past.

Perhaps for a special class such as a knockout or gambler’s choice I might go back to something that worked well in a similar arena but never for a regular competition. Frankly, it would be harder to adapt an old course to a different arena and competition than it is to design from scratch.

The priorities one has to deal with as a designer haven’t changed much either over the years. No. 1 is always safety.

My mentor, Pamela Carruthers, instilled in me a sense of responsibility to the horses, to the riders, to competition organizers and to the sport. For a horse or a rider to get hurt through any accident that could have been prevented by different design of the course or more attention to detail on my part would be the worst thing that I could ever imagine.

Almost as important is making the competition the best experience possible for the participants—happy customers want to return to the event.

As to the sport itself, I think it’s hard to find anything that has more impact on the style of riding and the methods of training than the design of the courses that competitors must jump.

Another thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that course designing is hard work. It isn’t glamorous, and the hours are lousy. Many others put in long hours, but I couldn’t begin to count the number of times that I was first on the grounds or last to leave—usually with one to three hours of paperwork left to do!

Lastly, in the quarter century that I’ve been doing this, few horse people (those with a real background in the sport of show jumping including riding at a serious level) chose to become course designers. This fact remains true today.

Maybe it’s because of all the different facets of the work that are involved, or the years needed to gain experience “on the other side of the course plan,” or maybe just because compared with riding or even training there isn’t as much glamour or thrill or money or appreciation as a designer.

Most any rider could sit down and design a good, or possibly brilliant, course plan for a single class. The person could also go out and get it built with the right help. But, multiply that by the number of classes per day and days per show, toss in the paperwork for each class and the need to fit everything into the time schedule, and the job becomes different—and much harder.

Courses and their design have become so much more sophisticated. When I first started riding over fences, course designers didn’t even exist on the West Coast. Someone (usually the show manager) decided where the jumps were set up as they came off the truck.

Every triple combination was the same: vertical, vertical, triple bar! Riders never walked the courses; they just got on and rode them.

When I traveled to Western Canada I was astounded by the courses Pamela Carruthers set. Taking my horses to a show where she was designing brought them to a whole new level—and sharpened my
riding by a mile.

Even while I was still competing, I spent as much time as I could picking her brain. She could evaluate the horses—all of the horses—competing in her ring after a single class and then have them jumping their absolute best by the final class. As a rider and trainer who developed my own horses, I really appreciated this gift, and after I became a course designer myself, that has remained my goal for each competition where I officiate.

The next thing that’s changed is the equipment we work with. Equipment is expensive to own and maintain, so change happens slowly as a rule. But the octagonal rails (or 60-pound trees) of old have been replaced by the machined-rounded rails of today. Cups have become more uniform and shallower.

Many of the changes originated in Europe, the heartland of show jumping. An obvious example is the safety cups now mandated at all competitions in this country just as they were years earlier for all Fédération Equestre Internationale-sanctioned competitions.

Thanks to these cups becoming mandatory—it took years for several show managers to agree—it’s a rarity to see a horse fall after a mistake at an oxer. We also see fewer refusals at the higher levels; I believe it’s because the careful horse required in today’s sport can keep his heart when the back rails on wide oxers neither trip him nor strain his back when he fails to get across one.

We can’t forget the phenomenal growth of the jumper division too. We’ve come a long way from the initial divisions to the many sub-sections with different heights, and finally the replacement of preliminary and intermediate with simple height sections for classes not restricted by rider. These are all good changes, opening the world of jumping to just about everyone.

To show how big jumping has become, one winter circuit, for example, offers 27 sections of jumpers in four different arenas. What worries me as a designer and as someone interested in the future of our sport, however, is that the schedule only lists the grand prix course designer—one of those four arenas.

For those riders and horses competing in the other three arenas it will be take what you get, and, in fact, only one class per week out of 68 total classes in those rings requires a licensed course designer! The others can be built by anyone at all. Can you imagine hunter classes at AA (or any) shows being judged by an unknown “someone” without a judge’s card?

Remember, the course designers for arenas 2, 3 and 4 are those charged with bringing along the riders and horses of the future.

I guess the final change that I feel isn’t in the best interest of our country as a whole, nor the individual riders and horses, is how much expediency seems to be the order of the day. The downside of the growth in jumping is the pressure to put so many classes into a competition and then to “beat the clock” to get the day finished.

Limiting course changes to save time—even if it means the 5-year-old horses jump the level 7 track, just lowered—is the norm. People are also required to walk courses with the fences gutted for the drag (designers know that there’s far more to know about a course than simply how many steps between related fences!).

It’s expedient, and certainly saves money, to have one person doing two or more jobs at a competition. Yet, while it’s possible to set up jumps in one or more arenas, it’s impossible to design courses without being able to watch the horses and riders in every division to accurately determine what questions for tomorrow’s class will bring them one step closer to their best performance ever.

While I did my share of multiple rings in my younger, and dumber, days, it was only by building one arena and watching carefully as the entrants jumped that I learned my craft. Few young designers have that privilege today. Even fewer have the background in riding and training jumping horses that’s so important in giving each and every section the kind of courses that suit them.

Even after 25 years of designing courses for competitions at every level—from unrated to the Olympic Games—I do still love the job. I’m far choosier about the invitations I accept these days—it means a lot to me to be a course designer and not just a course builder!