SF Gate
June 28, 2026
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.
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.
“I feel very passionately about doing what’s right, and you know, if at the end of the day we found out that this was best for the university, and it’s a bad thing for our daughters, but it’s understandable, we would have walked away,” said Sigrid Elschot, a Stanford professor and mom to a sophomore on the team. “But the more we dug, literally within the first couple weeks, the more we realized that there was something really egregious happening.”
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 late Friday, 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.
“I just think any parent who’s been through college applications can’t miss how awful it was to do this to these girls,” Landes told SFGATE through tears.
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.
“I’ve been in academia almost 17 years,” Elschot said. “I’ve sat on third parties, I’ve been the recipient of third parties, I’ve never seen anything like this, and my colleagues agreed. They said this was almost laughable — the number of errors in there.”
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.
In that same email to SFGATE late Friday, Nash objected to OSKR’s audit, saying it “did not conform to generally accepted auditing standards,” and even questioned the qualifications of the person OSKR used to perform the analysis.
After Nash’s comment, SFGATE spoke with Andy Schwarz, the author of the OSKR audit, who has worked as an economic consultant on NCAA matters since 1997. Schwarz found the school’s criticism of his work ironic.
“The premise of my analysis is that the NCAA accounting system is not well designed to assess the universitywide economic and financial questions regarding sports viability,” he said. “The criticism that I didn’t apply the NCAA standard accounting, or that I’m not even an accountant, kind of misses the point, because it was the accounting system, the approach, that led them to make their mistakes.”
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.
“There’s that second moment of how could they have done this to these 40 young women who deserve so much better than this, manipulating the numbers to mess with their lives,” Landes said. “… Just the idea that someone hurt these young women for such a gross reason is really depressing.
“Then the third emotion is, ‘Oh, they have not done anything yet about this.’”
That 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.
No matter what happens at the end of the month, Trimble will stay at Davis to complete her master’s. It hasn’t been easy for her and her teammates to just sit and wait to hear about their future in a sport they dedicated their lives to. They’ve dealt with the university’s silence with team dinners, weekend and evening hangouts and just regular check-ins to make sure everyone is doing alright.
“I feel like the announcement made us closer as a team — which, I hate to give that credit to [Davis athletic director DeLuca], but I feel like he really did bring us even closer together,” Trimble said, with a laugh.
What’s certainly helped keep their spirits up is the “amazing” level of support they’ve received during that time from the equestrian community as a whole, but especially the coalition of their parents who were able to put in the time and resources to fight back against what they saw as an injustice. The parental leaders say they won’t stop fighting even if the deadline comes and goes without the answer they were looking for. For as much as this is about bringing back a sport they believe never deserved to be cut in the first place, it’s also about making sure women’s sports are treated better at Davis — especially a program that’s been a national contender in their sport.
“These women have brought three conference championships to their university in the last 10 years, there’s no other team at UC Davis that has brought that many championships home,” Landes said. “And in the middle of an undefeated season, they have their team cut. I don’t think women’s athletes should have to live with the fear of having their team cut, even if they’ve done everything they can to be successful. Because there is nothing more these girls can do to prove the value of their team — other than win, which they did.”