Imagine the ultimate home field advantage. Not only does the home team provide the field, but they provide all the equipment. The equipment that is living, breathing and three times the size of you.

“It’s the luck of the draw,” said freshman Ashley Simakas, a new rider on the Vanderbilt Equestrian Team, which recently won their regional tournament.

“At the beginning of a competition you draw a horse’s name from a box,” said senior Amanda Hoyt. “A good horse can make a score. It shouldn’t, but it definitely has an impact. I mean, it is a live animal.”

The Vanderbilt Equestrian Team was started in 1999 by Mawghan McCabe during her freshman year, and the team competes in the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association.

Since the equestrian team is a club team, not a varsity sport, they compete in Division III instead of Division I. Although this lower status mandates less school funding, the team enjoys their D-III status.

“We have less restriction at D-III standing,” said McCabe, who coaches and provides moral for the team. “Within Division I there are strict professional rules and rules that regulate how you spend riding time outside of practice.”

These Division-I rules would prevent some students from competing on the team, including team member Whitney Goulart who is deemed “professional” by D-I standards.

Though initially Vanderbilt gave only $500 to the start-up team, the group now receives the maximum amount of funding: $7,500 a year in addition to $400 of dues members pay each semester.

But the money goes quickly.

“Usually we spend roughly $30,000 a year on hotels, transportation, entry fees, jackets and lessons,” McCabe said.

The team practices at Hunter’s Court in Murfreesboro, where they pay trainers for weekly lessons.

“It is an individual sport, like track, but a team sport in the fact that we practice together and support each other,” Hoyt said. “We give each other advice.”

—Allie Morris can be reached at allison.d.morris@vanderbilt.edu