Eureka Student Challenges Self, Seeks Knowledge Through Equestrian Competition

English dressage is an especially challenging equestrian discipline.

A rider and their horse enter a silent arena and progress through a series of precision-based exercises, with two judges scrutinizing every move for accuracy, aptitude in leading the horse through the required paces and harmony and communication between horse and rider.

It’s a sport that takes decades to truly master. And it’s the sport that has won rising Eureka High senior Bailey Slayton’s heart and imagination.

“There’s no way to perfect it,” she said. “There’s a really beautiful level system where, as you work and grow, you scale up. The beauty of it is that every single time you get to a new level, you break down and re-put back together the way you ride. In training level courses, you’re more concerned about getting the horse forward, marching and geometry – making sure your circles are circles. But as you get into Level 1 and 2, it’s more about the horse’s configuration and how you and the horse work together.”

Slayton has been riding since she was 7 and has competed in dressage for the past three years. In July, she earned acceptance into the US Equestrian Federation (USEF) Interscholastic Athlete Program. The USEF is the sport’s national governing body, and the program provides recognition for the accomplishments of young equestrians and encourages their future involvement in equestrian sport.

Athletes must document at least 100 hours of training a year for consideration in this program. Slayton easily meets that bar and competes two to three times a year.

On Aug. 1, she qualified for regionals and was awarded “High Point Junior Rider” and “High Point Trakehner” ribbons, meaning she had the highest combined score of any rider under 21 and the highest combined score of any rider on her breed of horse. She also placed first in three of her four classes and second in the other.

Slayton’s mother, Angie McBride, rides as well, so she knows the intricacies of her daughter’s sport.

“It is fussy and pedantic and hard,” McBride said. “It’s an intense amount of pressure, if you let it be. And your horse can feel all of that. You have to control your emotions. She’s just riding a 1,500-pound bicycle with its own opinion.”

As an elementary-schooler, Slayton started out by riding her grandmother’s horse. She attended equestrian camps and took riding lessons. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she started working with 20 to 25 horses on a daily basis at the Performance barn, where her family boarded their horses, tending to them and preparing their custom feed.

Last year, a rider brought their horse into Slayton’s trainer to see if she could help the horse become less temperamental and easier to ride. Slayton’s job was to sit on the horse while he did ground work – “like a crash-test dummy,” she said, with a laugh – and the two of them clicked immediately.

Slayton rode the horse two or three times before the owner decided to gift him to her. That horse is Cat, who is now her show horse.

“The big picture is that I’ve always loved to learn,” Slayton said. “I’ve always been a ‘but why’ and ‘but how’ kid. Growing up, I had endless amounts of questions because I wanted to know, down to the root, why everything was the way it was. The beauty of horses – and why a lot of people don’t like being an equestrian – is you will never know everything, and there’s always something to learn. Every single day, going to take care of horses, there’s always something you’re learning about their behavior or a way to speed up the process you’re doing to make it as efficient as possible.”

That love of knowledge has extended to her activities at Eureka. She has been an E! Crew student leader for the past two years and Student Council officer all four years of high school. She served as class treasurer for her freshman and sophomore years, class vice president as a junior last year and, this year, she will be Student Council secretary.

She joined the school’s entry-level choir course as a freshman after not taking chorus in middle school and, by the next year, was in Eureka’s top-flight ensemble. She has earned selection to the St. Louis Suburban MMEA District Treble Honor Choir two years in a row and earned two top “Gold” ratings with ensembles at the state Solo and Ensemble Music Festival.

“She has been this way since she was small. She is just an amazing young woman,” McBride said. “She is very self-directed. It’s really easy to support her in all of this because she just keeps setting her sights, she achieves, we talk about it, and then she wants to do the next thing. It is super rewarding to support her in this and watch her achieve her goals.”

Slayton plans to attend Truman State University and study some combination of business management and animal sciences. She hopes to move on to graduate school after that and become a small-animal veterinarian.

One of the main perks Truman offers is a barn where students can board their horses.

So Cat will be right there with her.

“I’d like to keep riding as a hobby. A lot of people who go into it professionally or do some sort of equine veterinary medicine sort of lose the love because they’re surrounded by it 100 percent of the time, which is understandable,” she said. “But I plan to do it my whole life.”

“We are super proud of her and so happy that she loves this,” McBride added. “It’s just what she’s supposed to be doing.”