Saddled With Obscurity : Equestrians: High school athletes in Southern California horseback-riding league face uphill battle for recognition.

The rumor you hear in the hallway--that your high school really has a varsity horseback-riding team--is probably true.

Some 33 schools from Ojai to San Juan Capistrano field teams in the Interscholastic Equestrian League. Like football and basketball players, equestrians represent their schools and ride off into the sunset with varsity letters. But nobody comes to their matches outside the immediate family.

“Even the cross-country team gets more school support,” says Ginny Coburn, mother of a rider.

One of only two high school leagues in the country (the other is in the Northeast), the IEL was formed eight years ago to provide teen-age riders with competition and recognition by their peers. But high school equestrians have had a rough time getting the respect they think they deserve. School principals and athletic directors have resisted the concept of riding as a team sport. The California Interscholastic Federation makes believe it doesn’t exist. Cheerleaders don’t show up at meets. And varsity jocks snub them at school.

“The football players don’t take this seriously,” says Sarah Quarles, a senior at Calabasas High. Even though Calabasas is the defending IEL varsity champion and Quarles won last season’s individual championship, “They don’t see me as a varsity athlete,” she says.

But equestrians are. They compete in the Olympics and have to possess the same dedication and competitive fire as any athlete. Like ice skaters, they also need supportive parents who will nurture and chauffeur them from an early age on. And in many ways, jumping is more dangerous than other varsity sports. For parents, it can be absolutely frightening. Imagine your kid coming home and saying, “Mom, I’m going out for a sport and need to buy some, uh, equipment. A helmet, pants, boots, and, um, gulp, a horse.”

On a recent Sunday at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, Coburn and Lynne Harris, Burbank neighbors, were bundled against the early morning chill, watching their daughters take part in the second of this season’s four IEL competitions. It seemed like a good time to convene the local chapter of Parents Whose Kids Are Hooked on Horses.

“It all began with that stupid pony ride when my daughter was 3,” Ginny says with a wry smile. Half-jokingly, she adds, “Biggest mistake I ever made.”

Ginny’s daughter Amy is now 15, a sophomore and a member--actually, the only member--of Bell-Jeff’s equestrian team. What began as a lark 12 years ago has turned into an expensive addiction costing more per month, Ginny likes to point out, “than our mortgage payment.”

At 9, Amy decided to jump horses. There’s a big difference between merely riding horses and jumping them. To get good at jumping, a rider needs to bond with the horse, something that doesn’t happen with the swayback rental mare at the riding stable. Ginny and her husband, both educators, knew what this meant: Amy would someday want her own horse.

The inevitable happened when she turned 11. But buy a horse? What would happen if Amy suddenly discovered boys? You can’t discard a horse like an old rag doll. So the Coburns compromised. They leased a horse.

“Only in Southern California,” Lynne Harris says, “can you lease a horse.”

By the time she was 13, the Coburns realized that hormones wouldn’t cure Amy. She was a serious horse junkie, taking a daily trip on the RTD to the Equestrian Center to get her fix. So the Coburns spent $6,000 for a “cheap horse,” Ginny says about a 6-year-old stallion. And you don’t get your friendly horse dealership to give you long-term financing and a factory rebate and throw in a warranty on the engine.

“You pay cash,” Ginny says. “It took every penny we had.”

But not all of the IEL competitors put their parents on the brink of poverty. Riding traditionally has been a sport for the wealthy, and high school riding is no exception. Some riders have a string of horses that specialize in each of the three classes (hunter, jumper, western). Amy’s bargain-basement horse often competes against horses that cost $100,000 and up. The disparity in the quality of horses is one of the inequities in the sport, especially at the high school level.

“If you have an expensive horse you can do better,” Ginny says.

“Our girls have to compete against these horses that are on automatic pilot,” says Lynne, whose daughter Stacy rides for Burbank High.

But the IEL recognizes the problem, so it tries to compensate by making the courses demanding for the riders. “In this league, kids who own one little old horse can do real well,” says Dr. Paul Toffel, a Glendale plastic surgeon and IEL vice president.

Toffel, whose daughter Hope was the individual champion two years ago, helped originate the league. In 1982, the first competition drew 44 riders from 11 schools, all of them private. “The private schools understood the concept” of having an equestrian team, Toffel says. But not all of them. Ginny Coburn says she was caught in a bureaucratic whirlpool at Bell-Jeff before the school approved the equestrian team.

“It didn’t want anything to do with riding because it wasn’t CIF,” she says. “They thought it would take away from the other sports at school.”

The league, course designer Merle Rose says, was once pressured by schools to join the CIF but decided not to try. “If you’re involved with big, you’re encumbered by rules,” he says. As for the CIF, Commissioner Thomas E. Byrnes says riding “is not a sport in my mind, but if schools wish to engage in other activities, they’re entitled to do so.” He said that some schools even have rodeo and surfing as varsity sports.

Insurance was also a problem for the IEL. “Some schools were a little bit reticent about insurance because they didn’t understand the sport,” says Toffel, who was U. S. Equestrian Team doctor at the 1984 Olympics. But a lot of parents still have to pay the $30 insurance fee at each competition.

Today, public schools are beginning to think differently about sanctioning an equestrian team. About half the members of the IEL now come from the public ranks. There’s even a growing acceptance of the sport. Amy Coburn’s jumping exploits got a whole page in the Bell-Jeff yearbook. The Calabasas team, given club status at first, jumped to the varsity level last year and even participated in the athletic awards banquet.

Some of the best junior riders in the country compete in the IEL. Quarles from Calabasas and Emily Straw of Flintridge Prep are two of them. Last year they battled for individual league honors, with Straw coming in second to Quarles.

Wearing school colors under their saddles at the recent Equestrian Center competition, they dueled in the horsemanship event, which drew about 20 entries. Each rider (girls outnumber boys by a 10-1 margin) had to memorize the course and make her horse jump over a series of 3 1/2-foot fences by giving nonverbal commands to the 1,000-pound animal.

Five of the entries, including Quarles and Straw, made it to the finals, where they had to ride without stirrups. They were advised over the P.A. system to jump three fences, halt their horse, back it up and then return to the line. After the riders completed the course, Straw was declared winner and was high-fived by a smiling Quarles.

“You like your friends to do well,” Quarles says. “Anyway, we just like having fun. You want to win for your school, but you don’t want to kill each other over it.”

Just don’t let the Calabasas football players hear you say that.