Student-athlete pairs his love for equestrian with engineering to study pro riders’ success

Junior John Hutchinson is enjoying a breakout season as one of two male riders in Liberty University’s equestrian program.

He won the Intermediate Fences and Open Flat divisions at an IHSA Hunt Seat Region 4 show on Feb. 4 at Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, Va., where he earned High Point Rider honors. He also placed first in Open Flat and fourth in Intermediate Fences at a Feb. 17 show hosted by the Liberty Mountain Equestrian Center. Those performances helped the team clinch the Region 4 regular-season championship on Feb. 24 to qualify for the April 6 IHSA Zone 4 Championships at Sweet Briar College in nearby Amherst, Va.

“You can tell first and foremost that he’s very passionate about the sport,” Head Coach Suzanne Flaig said. “He works very hard, is very competitive, and is very in tune with his own progress and how to set goals for himself.”

Equestrian is one of over 40 teams in Liberty’s thriving Club Sports Department.

With the sport having played such a prominent role in his life — Hutchinson has been riding competitively for more than 10 years and comes from a family of horse lovers — it was only natural for him to bring this passion into his studies. He is working toward a B.S. in Industrial & Systems Engineering with a minor in mathematics, and for his honors thesis is using data analytics to study more than 3,000 professional riders and horses throughout Europe and around the world to determine what factors go into successful showings in the International Equestrian Federation (FEI).

“John is extremely bright,” said Dr. Diana Schwerha, chair of the Computer, Electrical, and Industrial & Systems Engineering Department. “For his honors work, he used very advanced techniques of data scraping off the web and analysis methods to predict which horses and riders are successful in international show jumping. The methodology and analysis went much beyond what we teach at the undergraduate level.”

One of the conclusions he has drawn so far is that repetition in practice and competition are keys to success in professional shows.

“When a good rider goes out there, they go around for 70 seconds and it just looks perfectly flawless, like they’re not doing anything,” he said, “but that comes from riding for hours and hours, hundreds of different horses and thousands of competitions.”

The research confirms that practice makes perfect and work ethic is paramount.

“It truly reinforced that a lot of it is not based on talent; it’s just based on hard work and experience,” Hutchinson said. “The harder you work, the more you ride, the better you’re going to get. You need to ride all sorts of horses to get all sorts of different experiences and you get more tools in your tool belt that you can use.”

Overall, his research gives a clearer understanding of the show jumping sport using statistical models through machine learning, a subset of AI, and mathematical algorithms to predict outcomes.

“This isn’t based on judges, so I like this better because … it’s purely mathematical and analytical,” said Hutchinson, who plans to work as a data scientist or a machine learning engineer after graduation. “Anything that further advances the use of data and analytics in the industry is beneficial and modernizes it. Data analytics is the future of most industries, and you have to be able to use it to stay relevant.”

He will continue his research for the next three semesters.

“I’m just getting started,” he said. “I can do a lot more research on how different features about each horse and athlete interact with each other. There are probably 60 features, and I only took the top 10.”

Competing on Liberty’s equestrian team is a family affair for Hutchinson, whose twin sister, Claire, is a junior Hunt Seat teammate. Claire was the Limit Flat champion at the Region 4 Championships and has qualified for Zone Finals.

The siblings brought their own horses to Liberty from their home in Johnson City, Tenn. Claire rides Henry, while John, whose personal horse, Diego, is injured and had to stay at home, rides Duvall, the horse normally ridden by their younger sister, Lily, who plans to attend Liberty and join the equestrian program in the fall.

“They both are dedicated to the team activities, spend a lot of time taking care of their own horses, and are very successful in the classroom,” Flaig said of Claire and John. “It takes a lot of self-discipline. Not a lot of student-athletes would be able to balance those things as successfully as he has.”

John said he spends over 14 hours a week at the Equestrian Center, grooming Duvall and practicing with the team.

“For me, I focus on taking care of the horses first because they’re living beings, and then I focus on the schoolwork,” he said.

Flaig said Hutchinson’s dedication to the sport has rubbed off on the other riders.

“John is well respected and liked by his teammates and is a very important leader on the team,” she said. “He is a very serious competitor, though you wouldn’t know on the surface the level of competitiveness that he internalizes and maintains on a daily basis.”