As blog readers will know, we have been interested in the UC-Davis decision to cut its equestrian team.* It's not that your truly has any special interest in horses. But what strikes him about this story is its similarity to the tale of the Grand Hotel (Luskin Hotel and Conference Center) at UCLA back in the day. As really long-time readers will know, that tale began with a decision that appeared to have been made BEFORE a faulty report had been prepared that supposedly justified the project. That faulty report - along with a push-poll that was intended to show popular neighborhood approval of the project - was so bad that the notion of demolishing the Faculty Club (now University Club) to make way for the hotel had also to be abandoned.
But the project itself was simply moved to the center of the campus and then justified by a business plan that was withheld from public view until it had to be given to the Regents. The Regents initially rejected the campus plan - which itself is very rare action. But they eventually approved a modified version. The moral of this story seems to be that once the powers-that-be commit to an idea, even if flawed, it's very hard for anyone in authority in campus administration to admit error. Egos are involved, if nothing else. In one form or another, the project goes forward. The parents protesting the equestrian termination at UC-Davis are (re)discovering this lesson. From SFGATE:
It was an otherwise calm Friday in January when UC Davis officials called the equestrian team into a meeting with almost all of the school’s athletic administration in attendance, alongside sports psychologists. At that moment, Zadie Stack, a sophomore at UC Davis from Santa Cruz, sent a distressing text message to her mother, Jen Landes: “Oh my god, Mom, I think they’re going to cut the team.” Landes could hardly believe what she had read. The UC Davis equestrian team was in the midst of an undefeated season in their conference, and was ranked No. 7 in the nation at the time. They won back-to-back conference championships in 2023 and 2024, won again in 2026, and took part in the NCEA national championships in 2019 — their inaugural season — and 2024. It was a celebrated program that gave her daughter a chance to continue the sport she loved closer to home after transferring from the University of Tennessee at Martin. The athletes themselves couldn’t even imagine the possibility as they entered their team meeting room.
...But moments later, the unexpected became reality: After eight seasons as a varsity program for the Aggies, UC Davis Equestrian would be relegated from its status as a Division I sport and only be supported at the club level. Along with this stunning announcement, Trimble said that Davis’ athletics department told the women on the team not to fight this because it’ll be a lot harder for them if they do. This was presented as an open-and-shut case of simple accounting, a cold but calculated decision made after “detailed financial analysis and an independent assessment of the national competitive landscape,” the school said in its initial announcement on Feb. 17. And in line with how other colleges across California have handled the aftermath of cutting college sports teams in recent years, UC Davis leadership is refusing to do interviews about the topic. UC Davis spokesperson James Nash declined to answer SFGATE’s request for an update about the program’s status.
But in April, the school acknowledged it is reviewing its own decision to cut the team after others accused the school of manipulating the numbers it used when making the decision. And now, only days remain until the program officially ceases to exist, with no word from the school on the status of that review. That there is this waiting period at all is because of the Aggie student-athletes and their parents, who formed a group called Keep Davis Riding to keep pressure on the school and the athletic department. From the start, many in the group felt the school’s explanation didn’t add up. Whether that was because one parent was still getting fundraising calls for the program shortly after this news broke or because the school allegedly wouldn’t let the public see the data Davis referenced in its meeting with the student-athletes, they felt there were plenty of reasons to be suspicious.
UC Davis released a third-party report from Atlanta-based firm Collegiate Consulting that it used to inform its decision to cut equestrian on Feb. 17, about six weeks after the student-athletes learned they were losing their team. However, since Davis is a public school, it is subject to public records laws, and parents were able to receive additional information about the decision around that same time. And what the parents discovered only raised more red flags.
The most damning information they received in the documents, which the group shared with SFGATE, was that the athletic department began to consider cutting equestrian nearly a full year prior to its announcement. The university had tasked athletics with making a 10% cut to the department’s budget (approximately $1.05 million), and the athletic department said in March 2025 that cutting equestrian would supposedly save the school $1.02 million. After a few months of deliberation, the official decision to cut the program was made in August — five whole months before the school informed the student-athletes — pending an external review.
In an emailed response to SFGATE..., Nash said the “final decision” to cut the program wasn’t made until “shortly before” the Jan. 9 announcement. Documents SFGATE reviewed show a Dec. 18, 2025, email from athletic director Rocko DeLuca discussing the “previously aligned campus direction” about cutting the equestrian program and detailing precisely how UC Davis planned to message the decision on Jan. 9, a full 22 days later. In the cutthroat world of college recruiting and the transfer portal, both the students currently on the team and rising high schoolers recruited to Davis were left in the dark about the school’s plans for weeks, if not months...
But when the parents looked deeper, they found what they felt were major flaws in the third-party report, which compared data to schools without equestrian programs. Collegiate Consulting counted the value of donated horses as part of the overall cost of the program at Davis. It also failed to account for out-of-state tuition as part of the revenue that the program brought into the university. By the parents’ estimation, some of the costs were off by hundreds of thousands, and were reportedly 10 times higher than Fresno State, the only other California school with an equestrian team...
But when the parents looked deeper, they found what they felt were major flaws in the third-party report, which compared data to schools without equestrian programs. Collegiate Consulting counted the value of donated horses as part of the overall cost of the program at Davis. It also failed to account for out-of-state tuition as part of the revenue that the program brought into the university. By the parents’ estimation, some of the costs were off by hundreds of thousands, and were reportedly 10 times higher than Fresno State, the only other California school with an equestrian team.
...When presented with these concerns, UC Davis announced on April 3 that an independent auditor would review the initial report it based its decision to cut the team on. But Keep Davis Riding wanted to independently confirm that their conclusions, and math, were sound. They hired an independent firm called OSKR to do their own audit of the report. OSKR’s audit claimed the value of the donated horses was, in fact, counted under the program’s expenses for $665,000. Another expense was the boarding fees that the team paid the university, which should have been considered an “internal transfer where the expense item burdened by the team is a revenue item for the school,” the OSKR analysis said. Davis also reported that the team’s direct overhead costs in 2024 were 45 times its average from 2019-2023, and the Collegiate Consulting report did not consider coaching salaries when comparing expenses to other Davis sports, OSKR said.
UC Davis reportedly overstated the equestrian team’s expenses by more than $850,000, more than double its actual amount, OSKR argued. UC Davis had initially claimed the equestrian team was second among the school’s 25 sports teams in terms of per-athlete spending. But without the overstated amount, OSKR’s audit said the equestrian team was actually 15th.
...Initially, the parents felt equally vindicated in their efforts and hopeful that this could, in fact, be the final push to help save the program. But the celebrations could only last for so long. ...[The] announcement of an audit was 86 days ago, and UC Davis Chancellor Gary May told the school’s student newspaper, the California Aggie, “It’ll be completed by the end of June.” But the school continues to provide no update to the status and, when asked by SFGATE when it expects to publish said audit, school spokesperson Nash said, “We’ll release it to you once it’s public.”
The end of June also marks the end of the athletic school year, meaning the program will be officially demoted after June 30. According to Trimble, who served as an officer for the team, just three of the 40 riders were able to transfer to another program, leaving the remaining 37 without a D-I team to compete on and, in some cases, a scholarship...
Full story at https://www.sfgate.com/collegesports/article/uc-davis-cut-equestrian-22317870.php.
It appears, in short, that that administrative strategy in this case is to run the clock and thus "win" by default.
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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/06/want-of-horse.html.
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