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.
“Honestly, the team getting cut was the last thing on my mind,” Mylea Trimble, a junior rider from Exeter, told SFGATE. “I was more expecting for them to, you know, tell us that maybe one of our coaches was getting let go, or we were having a staff change or something like that.”
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…