Nipper and his pals couldn’t wait to make the move from a circus-size tent, where they had endured cold winds and wet hooves for a year, into their new digs in the renovated School Barn.
Nipper now reclines on futon-like foam at night, and sips from an automatically refilling Nelson Horse Waterer. Every hour the handsome 17-year-old gray Anglo-Arab gelding gets a spray of anti-fly solution from a dispenser in the ceiling, and whenever he wants to check out who’s putting in treadmill time on the outdoor electric horse walker, he can poke his head through the window in his Brazilian-walnut stall. As he nickers to his neighbors, it’s clear that Nipper is a happy camper these days, as is his owner, senior Alex Herbert.
In the School Barn and its big brother, the historic Red Barn, “everything is state-of-the-art,” Herbert says. The equestrian facilities recently underwent a $4 million makeover, modeled after the U.S. team headquarters in Gladstone, N.J. “It’s just a phenomenal facility,” Herbert says.
Herbert has boarded Nipper in the campus barns since her freshman year. She joined the equestrian team as a sophomore and now is its co-president, with sophomore Caroline Feinberg. Nipper, one of 15 horses owned by or on loan to the 50-member team, has become a favorite mount for beginners learning to trot and for more advanced riders who yearn to jump. He and the other so-called lesson horses are the dependable Toyotas of the team, says Herbert. “They have to be pretty patient, tolerant and easygoing.”
Vanessa Bartsch, ’99, has overseen the renovation as general manager of the facility, and also serves as head coach of the equestrian team, which competes against nine other schools in the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association. A music major who returned to the Farm after doing publicity work for the San Francisco Opera, she had written letters to the University for 10 years, lobbying for upgraded arenas and barns that would carry the reputation of Leland Stanford’s technologically advanced Palo Alto Stock Farm—home of the legendary sire Electioneer—into the 21st century. It wasn’t right, Bartsch argued, that equestrian team riders often had to practice late at night. (When lights snuffed out, it spooked the horses.) Paddocks were poorly graded and strewn with rocks. One arena had been dubbed the “duck pond” for the waterfowl that were attracted to its standing water. “Every other athletic facility [on campus] is state-of-the-art, and this one needed some TLC,” she says.
With equestrian team alums Gwyn Gordon, ’89, and Jana Cain, ’00, Bartsch did the math on feed costs and staffing, and came up with a business proposal for director of athletics Ted Leland, PhD ’83. When the lease held by the former managing company expired in August 2004, the department of athletics, physical education and recreation reassumed management of the center, with the goal of offering more riding classes and expanding services for the equestrian team. “For riders on the team, this is the heart of Stanford,” Bartsch says as she shows off the grooming stalls of the Red Barn, one of the last remaining buildings of the stock farm. “This is why [the University] is here.”
Formally reopened in October, the Red Barn and School Barn now house 67 horses. Equestrian team horses occupy 20 stalls, 20 students board their own horses for $450 per month, and the remaining 27 stalls are allocated to community members, who pay $1,100, and to faculty and staff, who are charged $800. University archivist Margaret Kimball, ’80, for example, has been riding on the Farm since 1992, and stops by the Red Barn every morning to give Misty, her bay Thoroughbred mare, a Red Pony treat. In the evenings they often ride in one of the four revamped arenas.
Student enthusiasm is booming. This fall, 80 would-be riders tried out for the equestrian team, and 125 undergraduates and graduate students vied for 25 openings in Horsemanship: Beginning Riding. Bartsch says those are encouraging signs of reviving interest in the historical roots of the University. “Some days you’re leading a horse through the barn and thinking, ‘This is where Electioneer walked, down this very same aisle,’ ” she says. “It’s kind of cool.”
