So, it’s been a few years since I graduated so I’m sure these numbers have changed as my college IHSA team has grown leaps and bounds since I left but this is what I paid:
(for reference, a large state school - but we were a club sport and got very minimal funding from the school)
We paid $300 a semester for “dues” which went to the team and covered future travel expenses like busses.
For entry fees, I showed fences and flat, and I believe class fees were $30. Part of that cost went to the host school and part went to the region. For a whole weekend of showing (two “shows”), I was only out $120 at most.
We paid for our own apparel, and were required to buy certain items like team polos for lessons and team “warm up” jackets and pants for travelling to competitions. That got a little expensive.
We were required to take at least 1 lesson a week, which cost us $35 and was split between our coach and the owner of the barn where we practiced. We used her lesson horses for all of our team practices, so she got a % of the lesson fee.
Our team hosted two shows each year and also hosted regionals. We used a facility that was relatively cheap to rent, and we offset our cost by doing a lot of the work ourselves so the facility would charge us less. (ie - we scraped all of the stalls bare after the weekend was over). We recycled ribbons when possible, we never put the years on our ribbons for that purpose. All horses at our shows were donated from friends in the horse community.
Our school has very strict apparel rules, but we have “approved” vendors who are licensed to create products with the school logo. We sold those at every show for fundraising. Also, we sold concessions to raise extra money.
The team spent about $25k each year on everything for a team of about 35 girls.
Hope this helps!
It’s been a million years, but I was the treasurer for my IHSA team and had to submit the budget with the club sports office (so, yeah, club not NCAA). We paid IHSA dues and some pretty low club dues. Lessons were extra expense unless you signed up for the equestrian PE class in which case there was a flat rate for the lessons associated with those credits. Most rode or took lessons somewhere not affiliated with the team, as our team didn’t host shows or have much of a “coach.” For a time, we didn’t have an official coach at all, and when we did, she never traveled to any of the shows. The PE class I took involved me tuning up some naughty lesson horses. I digress… The club sports budget paid for travel if we used the school’s vans. I don’t think anyone bothered doing personal gas reimbursement if we drove ourselves. We never stayed overnight. The team paid entries. The team bought the seniors a gift at the end of the year, which for my year was a nice monogrammed saddle pad in school colors.
It was pretty low budget, but also not a big expense for the riders necessarily if you could volunteer some free saddle time for a local trainer in need to keep in shape. But it was roughly on par with my experience as a grad student doing club cycling–most of the stuff associated with travel and entries was paid for by the school/club sports. Coaching was not offered. Club membership dues were kept pretty low.
Same here, though we just did two lessons a week. I wore my own clothes (or, when my coach decided to move me to varisty two days before a competition, I wore my own shirt and underwear and everything else I borrowed from my teammates. Actually I borrowed my coat from a rider on a different university’s team), university provided horses, coach, entry fees, travel, etc. And we paid our own dues (I think it was like $40).
I didn’t know how lucky I was at the time, but from this thread I could not have afforded IHSA had it not been a varsity sport.
