Stanford Red Barn

I enrolled in the unmounted Horsemanship class here at the Red Barn. I have not been around horses for 20 years and found this class to be a great refresher in horsemanship. The instructor is very approachable and will answer any question you pose to her. She is obviously highly knowledgeable. The class covers basic care such as grooming, tacking up, feed choice, through to equine disease. There is plenty of flexibility in materials covered and the instructor caters the classes to the skill level of the participants.
One of the great sessions is where the Stable’s vet comes in and teaches the class how to take vitals on a horse as well as covering vaccinations. Every week we were able to interact with Stanford’s wonderful horses, all of which are well-​mannered to the extent that everyone is comfortable being around them.
The class size is small so everyone gets plenty of one-​on-​one time with the horses. This is a great refresher class and should be a requirement before getting in the saddle for the mounted classes. After taking this class, everyone is more than capable of handling a horse for grooming and tacking up for riding, as is necessary for taking lessons at nearly every riding facility in the area.
Classes last for 10 weeks and are typically 2 hours in length. Discounted for Stanford students and faculty but welcomes all community members as well.

The Stanford Red Barn is beautifully maintained and it’s full of great people and horses. I’ve been riding there since I joined the Stanford Equestrian Team last year, and the barn is the perfect place for me to get away from my schoolwork and exercise.
The grounds are gorgeous. My family and I visited the barn when I got to Stanford, and we were blown away. I still can’t believe the barn’s beauty when I go out to ride, and after having ridden at several barns in high school, I know how lucky I am to have access to this facility!
The team is run amazingly well by student officers and professional coaches. Some of the coaches run their own training businesses out of the Red Barn, so there’s always a healthy mix of students, community members, and professionals around.

Unresponsive and unprofessional. As a faculty member and avid horse enthusiast, I had hoped to get involved as both a rider and a student sponsor. We own several exceptional show horses and have completely given up trying to stable any of our horses at Stanford and even given up trying to provide really nice horses for students to show and ride (PREs, Lusitanos and Friesians). In a last effort to communicate I have called and left two messages with the barn manager (no response), emailed (no response), filled out the on-​line form (no response) and visited personally leaving a written message. This kind of unprofessional management is really surprising and disappointing for a first rate university. Not a great message to send to the faculty that are willing to sponsor and support and a worse message and consequence for the students and university who would benefit.

*This review is for the lesson program, not boarding*
The red barn has some nice horses, particularly for beginner/​internediate riders, but their organisation is terrible. It took me forever to even get someone to contact me about lessons, and it was pretty clear that the community lesson program isn’t exactly a high priority for them. We were commonly given horses that had already been ridden several times that day and horses that weren’t physically capable of doing the lessons they’d been assigned to.
Sometimes at the end of the evening there would be no turnout left for the last lesson horse, meanwhile there’s no barn staff anywhere and everyone else has gone home.
It’s a shame because they have great facilities and some really sweet horses, but the poor organisation definitely makes this barn not worth it.

I ended up moving my horse to a 5-​horse family run barn in Woodside and he is a different animal! At the Red Barn he would come out for his stall just looking for something to spook at. Now he is the quiet relaxed horse that I love to own and ride. The difference is daily turn out and an environment that caters to horses. I stick my review of the facilities but I have to say the atmosphere and energy at the Red Barn is not ideal for many horses.