Fourth Annual Competition (Equestrian Team)

We are the Northwestern University Equestrian Team (NUET). While we love our sport, we also cherish the community that it builds. Although our teammates range from undergraduate and graduate students, to beginners and world-renowned riders, we are all able to bond over our shared passion for horses and the equestrian sport. We practice at On Course Riding Academy, located in Wauconda, Illinois, under the guidance of our coach, Valerie Kinsella. We take pride in practicing good horsemanship by helping out with various chores around the barn, such as taking care of the horses and painting paddock fences. We also compete against neighboring colleges through the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association (IHSA) over fences and on the flat.

Our team is fortunate enough to be working with On Course Riding Academy to host a competition for the IHSA-registered college teams in our region. We are a smaller team and therefore have only hosted a few shows before, which were huge successes! Every member of the team pitched in for an extraordinary day of hard work, great horsemanship, and lots of fun. For 2021, we want to do it all over again! We would once again like to give back to the colleges in our region, who have been generous in hosting shows and supporting our teammates year after year. Because our region is small and does not offer many showing opportunities, it is difficult for nearby colleges to advance to the final shows at the national level. By hosting a show, our team would in turn help these riders advance toward their equestrian endeavors. Our show will tentatively take place in the winter of 2021, and, as one would expect, will take a full team effort to plan and execute. If, due to COVID-19, we are unable to host our show this winter, then our show will be postponed until the next academic year. 

Costs include hiring a judge for the duration of the show, renting our barn’s facilities for the day, using our barn’s horses, and other miscellaneous fees associated with equestrian competitions.

Your gifts are a tremendous help to the team and will help make this dream a reality once again. While we are different from most club and varsity sports at Northwestern University, we work hard to maintain a strong presence on campus and in the surrounding community.