Should jumper, and possibly hunter riders, have to demonstrate competence to move up the levels of competition? That was a question Britt McCormick, president of the U.S. Hunter Jumper Association, asked a group of approximately 40 people who attended the USHJA Hunter Forum West, held Monday at Desert International Horse Park in Thermal, California.

Getting feedback on the idea of requiring some type of qualification to advance up the levels was just one topic discussed at the meeting, which also covered a new USHJA effort to identify potential calendaring conflicts between the association’s events and other major competitions, as well as challenges associated with hiring show judges.

The meeting was the second stop—the first was in January in Wellington, Florida—on what McCormick called the association’s new listening tour.

“As someone who comes from Texas—which is a little bit like California, in that we’re quite different than the East Coast and most of the country—[we know that] one size doesn’t fit all, and so one of our goals is to make sure that we are nimble enough to provide what you guys need, how you need it, when you need it, where you need it,” McCormick told attendees. “This is a new concept that we’re trying to introduce that we are coming to you, and we’re here to listen and to take notes and to figure out what’s broken and what’s working and what’s not.

“My hope is that—we were just discussing this last night—that we continue to do these throughout the year, and not only do them at the Thermals and the Wellingtons of the world, but I want to pick the biggest outreach competition on the West Coast and the East Coast and go there and talk to those people as well, because they’re going to have different concerns than a lot of you guys do,” added McCormick, McKinney, Texas. “So as we get this ball rolling, hopefully it will get people to show up.”

Should Riders Earn The Right To Move Up?

In the sport of eventing, riders can’t move up a level until they earn minimum eligibility requirements at their current level. McCormick asked if hunters and jumpers should try something similar for safety’s sake, and for the sport’s social license to operate.

The Fédération Equestre Internationale, for example, is considering implementing a maximum number of faults per round before elimination in jumping, and the Dutch federation already has a maximum-fault rule.

“So let’s say you have a children’s or adult amateur [hunter] that’s showing at 3’ and they want to move up,” McCormick said. “So do they just get to buy a horse and move up, or do they have to earn their way with either a set score, a number of set scores or, in the jumper ring, [a certain number of] clear rounds? It’s not winning, just clear rounds and show a capability to be able to jump 3’3” or 3’6”, before they’re allowed to just go walk in that ring [at a higher level]. And so that’s the concept that I think is coming. I think it’s going to start on the jumper side, because if any of you watch the 1.20-meter or 1.25-meter you can see some really scary stuff in that ring as it’s become kind of the new children’s/adult jumper, right? And so looking that direction, is that a way we want to go?”

Archie Cox, who runs Brookway Stables in Sylmar, California, offered that such a requirement could place a greater financial burden on riders, requiring them to enter more classes to earn their way into higher divisions.

“I understand and like the idea of safety, of course, but that seems to me that it’s a way to drive people out of the sport,” he said. “I take a good rider and maybe they’ve done [the 3’6” equitation] and the hunter side of the sport and they want to buy a 1.30-meter horse. We do one show in the children’s jumpers and we’re champion, one show in the 1.20-meters and we’re champion. How many shows does someone have to do or clear rounds to allow that person to move up? Because unless they’re showing a lot and financially flush, you’re telling people this is a rich person’s sport—and it already is. You don’t need to [make it worse.]”

Requiring riders to earn their way to a higher level, rather than just buying a more competent horse, would help trainers whose students want to move up but aren’t ready, McCormick said.

“The trainer says, ‘You’re not capable. You’re not ready,’ ” he said. “They go on to the next trainer who says ‘Hey I don’t care. Pay me to move up all you want.’ That’s where this started.”

Traci Brooks, who runs Balmoral Farm with her husband Carleton Brooks in Los Angeles, put it succinctly, saying that just because a student wants to post on Instagram that they jump 1.30 meters doesn’t mean they should be jumping that high.

Several people pointed out that clear jumper rounds don’t necessarily equate to competent, safe riding, and riders should be rewarded for quality rounds, rather than fault-free ones. That lead to a discussion of how quality should, or could, be assessed: Should jumper judges be evaluating rounds, perhaps eliminating unsafe riders or instructing riders with scary rounds to speak with the judge?

Experienced FEI and U.S. Equestrian Federation jumping judge and steward Janet Fall, Madras, Oregon, said that’s not a perfect system. Give someone a yellow card for leaving out strides, for example, she said, and they’ll come back with a video of McLain Ward leaving out strides to win a class.

“We know the difference, but it’s no different to that person,” she said.

Several people brought up a concern that licensed officials don’t feel they’re backed up by USEF for making tough calls, and McCormick agreed that there should be a way to better protect licensed officials from disgruntled exhibitors.

Getting The Best Judges In The Booth

Speaking of officials, forum attendees discussed the lack of active, currently competing horsemen sitting in judges’ booths. Several people pointed out that the economics of judging, especially while running a barn, are discouraging.

“It’s not worth it for me to judge more than two times a year,” said Hope Glynn, a professional from Petaluma, California, who has had her judge’s card for over 20 years.

Between travel expenses and day rates for judges, Glynn said, she ended up paying her dog sitter in a higher hourly wage than she earned judging when she traveled east to work at the Pennsylvania National Horse Show.

“We’ve got to change that concept somehow, to encourage more good horsemen and more good judges to be in this sport judging,” she said.

Like her, others said that the pay rate for judging hasn’t kept pace with inflation, and the days are longer. McCormick pointed to his son, Stone McCormick, as an example of how up-and-coming horsemen view the prospect of judging.

“My son is 24 and in business with me,” he said. “There isn’t any way he’s going to go spend the time to get a license to work for $650 a day. And I feel that that generation is a lot that way: Their time is more valuable to them than money they would rather have the day off or the week off, or the week at home.”

“We’ve got to change that concept somehow, to encourage more good horsemen and more good judges to be in this sport judging.”

Hope Glynn

Phil DeVita, who co-manages the Desert Circuit alongside Pat Boyle and has had his hunter and jumper “R” judges’ cards, as well as his course designing license, for 47 years, weighed in on the challenges of getting good judges from a show manager’s perspective.

“It’s a grand thought to say, you know, I want to have the top, best-qualified judges every week at the horse show, but most of the top qualified judges in the country are showing,” he said. “They’re showing and training on one coast or the other; to pull them away is nearly impossible.”

Part of the reward for judging, he noted, is intangible.

“The weeks that I judged, I lost a ton of money, but I wanted to judge,” he said, “because you’re giving back to the sport. You’re trying to improve your skills. You’re trying to be a better individual, a better professional by being a trainer, a rider, whatever, and judging and doing courses or managing or whatever you’re doing. But I think that to say that, ‘I want to get paid enough to judge to make it worth my while’ … it’s impossible. It’s physically impossible.”

Attendees discussed creating tiers of judges to give more experienced or better judges a higher rating to presumably pay them more money. But that idea faced problems when vetted by a joint USEF/USHJA Judges Task Force, who found that it’s hard to figure out what criteria to use to separate judges into levels.

Calendar Conflicts

A discussion of USHJA’s World Championship Hunter Rider program during the meeting ushered a broader discussion of how the USHJA assigns its properties to existing shows.

During Monday’s meeting, WCHR Task Force member Jenny Karazissis, who runs Far West Farm along with her family in Calabasas, California, said the task force received 100 applications from shows in the WCHR Southwest region—California and Nevada—and awarded WCHR status to 10 of them, eight in Southern California and two in Northern California. WCHR shows have extra appeal for West Coast riders, many of whom use the WCHR regional standings as year-end goals rather than heading east for indoors due to the cost and logistics involved.

Ashley Herman, of Sonoma Horse Park in Petaluma in northern California, asked Karazissis and McCormick why two of those 10 shows run against each another: her show, the Giant Steps Charity Classic, where 40% of her entries typically come from southern California, and the Del Mar Summer Festival I in southern California. She pointed out that this combined with the permanent cancellation of the Menlo Charity in relatively nearby Menlo Park, California, which took place the week before her show, means fewer people will make the trip to northern California to support Giant Steps, which is a rare charity horse show.

McCormick agreed it was a problem, and said USHJA has started a project to identify potential calendar conflicts between USHJA properties, like USHJA International Hunter Derby regional championships and WCHR shows, as well as between USHJA properties and USEF properties, like USEF Pony Finals (Kentucky) or the Dover Saddlery/USEF Hunter Seat Medal Final (Pennsylvania) and major competitions that aren’t owned by either, like the National Horse Show (Kentucky).

That would help folks like Shayne Wireman, the owner and head trainer at Chestnut Hills Equestrian Center in Bonsall, California, with a problem she ran into last year, when one of her students qualified for two important events both held the same weekend on opposite coasts, the MZ Farms/USHJA Emerging Athletes Program National Training Session, being held in Virginia, and the Platinum Performance USEF Show Jumping Talent Search Finals—West, in California.

“She had to make a choice, and that’s a pretty not-good thing to have that happening,” Wireman said. “I know you can’t always avoid overlap, but I don’t feel like there was any regard for what anyone on the West Coast thought should happen in that situation.”

WCHR Pro Finals Changes

FEI Level 3 course designer course designer Meghan Rawlins asked why the format of the WCHR Pro Finals at Capital Challenge was changed. Previously six professional hunter riders competed on a horse of their choosing in a playoff round, with the top riders advancing to the “final four” to compete on unfamiliar horses donated for this purpose. In 2024 this changed to just four professionals, who swapped horses with no playoff round.

Karazissis said that there were two reasons, including that it was asking a lot of owners to let their horses do yet another round with a professional rider at a busy horse show.

“There was a lot of thought that went into that,” she said. “With the playoff round [in 2023], for example, Nick Haness was leading the country for pretty much the entire year, and then he had a mishap in the playoff round and he wasn’t even able to ride in the top four. That just seems completely wrong.”

But not everyone agreed with that reasoning.

“There’s people that go to the Olympics and then something goes wrong,” pointed out Shelley Campf who runs Oz Inc. in Canby, Oregon. “That’s just real sport, and I think that the thing that was most talked about, about that, was that Nick didn’t make the top four. I love Nick; he and I are good friends. There were two people that were disappointed, and like 90 that were like ‘Yeah! Nick finally screwed up. He never screws up!’ I thought taking that out was boring, and I think that was like, ‘Even Nick Haness can make a mistake.’ ”

Other News Of Note

• Karazissis updated attendees on proposed changes to the USHJA’s WCHR program. The task force has been discussing a suggestion to split Florida from the WCHR Southeast region and make it its own region, thanks to the concentration of shows and riders there. They’ve also been talking about adding a low child/adult WCHR regional award. (Karazissis emphasized that there is not discussion of adding a low child/adult WCHR challenge class at the sold-out Capital Challenge Horse Show [Mar­yland] which hosts the WCHR year-end finals for many hunter divisions.)

• Traci Brooks, who chairs the National Hunter Derby Task Force, shared that the group is considering a national championship.

“There’s also been discussion about doing a star system, similar to what the [USHJA International Hunter Derby program] is doing and possibly working together with the [International Hunter Derby Task Force] to make our journeys more alike with regard to specs so it’s easier to follow,” she said.

• Campf, who runs horse shows in Oregon, argued that certified schooling supervisors, which are required for some big-money classes, are difficult to get—there are only a handful on the West Coast—and largely unnecessary.

 “We police each other really,” she said. “We don’t need to waste resources on a schooling supervisors for a $10,000 derby.”