The Texas A&M equestrian team was disappointed it couldn’t win its first Southeastern Conference championship, despite being the top seed and competing at home last month. The Aggies can atone for that with a strong showing at the National Collegiate Equestrian Association Championship at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Fla.
The fourth-seeded Aggies (9-4) will compete against fifth-seeded Georgia (9-5) on Thursday. The other first-round matchups are top-seeded TCU (12-2) vs. eighth-seeded UC Davis (6-6), third-seeded Auburn (9-5) vs. sixth-seeded Oklahoma State (8-6) and second-seeded SMU (9-4) vs. seventh-seeded South Carolina (7-8). The semifinals will be on Friday and the finals on Saturday.
A&M started the spring season ranked second in the country. It was in position to be seeded higher for the national championship, but lost the regular-season finale to Auburn 13-5 and then lost again to the Tigers 13-6 at the Hildebrand Equine Complex on March 30 for the SEC title.
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“We might have an opportunity to play them [again] at the championship, but I’m looking forward to this group of girls [finishing],” A&M coach Tana McKay said. “This is a great group of girls. I know they’ll bounce back. That loss probably only lit a fire underneath them, so I’m excited to see what they can get done.”
A&M since its last show has both physically and mentally put in the hours to be successful, McKay said.
“We do a lot of film review,” McKay said. “The one neat thing when we do postseason competition is we’re not riding our own horses. We take film all year long from the Big 12 Championship [and] from our championship and really try to dissect those horses and learn those horses’ quirks and tendencies so we’re a little more prepared going into the championship, because there is no home-field advantage and it truly is a level playing field.”
A&M is gunning for a fourth overall national championship. The Aggies won in 2002, the inaugural year the NCEA had an overall winner, along with 2012 and ’17. When A&M won the title in 2017 it was seeded third heading into the SEC Championship, where it lost to second-seeded Auburn, which in turn lost to top top-seeded Georgia. A&M, which was seeded fifth at the NCEA Championship that year, defeated Delaware State, Oklahoma State, TCU and Georgia for the title.
A&M will be competing against Georgia for the third time this season. Both teams won at home, A&M by a 13-6 score on Oct. 6 and Georgia by a 13-7 count on Feb. 17.
“Any SEC team we play is going to be extremely tough,” McKay said.
The SEC, which has four teams competing in the sport, won every national title from the NCEA inception in 2002 until 2022 when the Big 12 Conference’s Oklahoma State broke through followed by SMU last year. Georgia has a nation-leading seven national championships. Auburn has six, while South Carolina has three. The SEC didn’t have a championship for the sport until 2013 then the SEC made it the 21st sport in which the league would crown a champion. Four times since then, a team which didn’t win the SEC title won the national championship. Ironically, every team has done it once. A&M will try to be the first to do it twice.
“I think our Reining team has been really strong,” McKay said. “The sport of equestrian is very challenging, because it’s an individual sport and they’re in there [competing] and they don’t have to rely on their teammates to get them the ball or anything like that.”
A plus for this group is their cohesiveness, which was on display behind the scenes as they were tireless in helping A&M host the SEC Championship, McKay said.
“They work very well together,” McKay said. “There are some mistakes that were made at the SEC Championship where you can’t have those mistakes at this level. I know they’ll be able to clean them up, too.”
The sport continues to grow. A&M added equestrian for the 1999-2000 season. For the first decade it had a lot of competitions against Baylor, Kansas State, SMU, Oklahoma State and TCU. A&M had a lot of success, winning six NCEA Western national championships and three Intercollegiate Horse Shows Association from 2002-12 along with two overall NCEA overall national championships.
“When we moved to the SEC, it was an eye-opener for all the sports, and for us as well,” McKay said.
It’s helped A&M’s recruiting, while the sport’s interest also continues to climb.
“I think the athletes in high school understand a little bit more about what we do, because it is different than what they do in high school when they’re showing their own horse,” McKay said. “I think the interest in young ladies has really grown. I get kids sitting my office now who say since they were 5 or 6 they have wanted to ride on an equestrian team and that’s why they got a horse and their parents put their daughters into lessons.”
That’s created a deeper talent pool for all teams, McKay said.
Odds, ends. McKay was the program’s first coach. She credits former A&M athletic director Wally Groff and equine science director Gary Potter for making it happen. “It was an easy fit,” said McKay who was a graduate student when they started talking about making it a varsity sport.
When McKay was hired, she was teaching classes in the equine department.
The team started with the existing facilities. It moved to the Brazos County Expo Complex five years later and a decade ago moved into the state-of-the-art Hildebrand Equine Complex, which gave the athletes their first locker room.
A&M is among 22 schools that compete in equestrian, which is considered an “emerging women’s sport” by the NCAA along with acrobatics and tumbling, rugby, stunt, triathlon and wrestling. ...This is the third year the equestrian championships have been held at the World Equestrian Center, which McKay said is “the Disneyland of equestrian centers.” The event had been previously held in Waco.