Co-captain Lily Macartney '08 summed up the attitude of the seniors.
"People are pretty excited about this weekend, pumped to go out with a bang," Macartney said.
For the whole team, the show will conclude a successful season.
In regular season contests, the team never finished lower than fourth place, competing with eight to 10 other teams in each show.
After the regular season, nine of the 15 riders qualified to participate in the Regional Championship, a competition for the best riders in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and parts of Massachusetts.
Following the regional competition, four senior riders -- Macartney, co-captain Daisy Freund '08, Elizabeth Bissell '08 and Katherine Scovner '08 qualified to compete in the Zone Championship, a contest between the top finishers from several Regional competitions.
The Zone competition is comprised of the best riders from all of New England, and winners continue to the national championship.
At Zones, Freund finished in first place in the Open Flat competition and fourth in her Cacchione Challenge class. Bissell finished seventh in Open Flat, Macartney came in fourth in the Novice Flat competition and Scovner finished in fifth in the Intermediate Flat event.
Freund's first-place finish gave her the win in the Cacchione Cup, a distinction given to the high point rider in the Open division of the region.
Freund will go on to compete in two events at the national championship, which will take place in California on May 8-11.
Each of the 29 regions in the United States sends one rider to Nationals as the Cacchione Cup rider to compete against each other in a special class. Freund went to Nationals with this distinction in 2005.
"The top 10 riders get to go back and test," Freund said. "My freshman year, I was 11th by half a point, so I didn't get to test, and that would be my goal, to be in the top 10."
The whole team will compete against other Ivy League schools, a mix of varsity and club teams, in a show that is not part of the regular season and thus has no bearing on team or individual results.
According to Freund, the Ivy competition is less a battle for the Ancient Eight title than a representation of Dartmouth's unique attitude towards the sport and a festive way to end the season.
"The Ivy League Championships are the pinnacle of all of our silliness," Freund said. "We do very well as a team and I'm very proud of the team this year, but I'm mostly proud of the attitude that we've had."
The show will be structured like any other show, with eight levels of riding -- three levels of jumping, three levels of flat work, walk trot and walk trot canter. Teams rack up points in each level depending individual performances, regardless of level.
Despite the formal structure of the competition, Freund remarked on the informal nature of the Ivy rivalries.
"A big part of our prep work for the Ivies is figuring out how we're going to prank Cornell," Freund said. "Dartmouth and Cornell have a really big prank rivalry."
A few years ago, Cornell covered one of Dartmouth's farm vans with ketchup. Dartmouth responded last year by scrawling "Dartmouth Rocks" on the front of Cornell's indoor arena in mustard and moving the indoor jumping course into the shape of a "D."
While Dartmouth has had a successful season, and hopes to be competitive in the Ivy Championship, the team's spirited attitude is typical, according to Freund.
"We're a very close sort of family," Freund said. "We just have a lot of fun. Every show we go to we have flair, that we, the captains, dole out, and force our team members to pretty much happily wear. Everyone else takes themselves very seriously, but Dartmouth marches into the show wearing googly eyes or massive pink cowboy hats and whips, which is the best part."
Although equestrian is typically an individual sport, Macartney stressed the importance of the team's dynamic, which she says sets the Big Green apart from its Ancient Eight counterparts.
"The team has done a fantastic job of coming together and really being supportive of everyone," Macartney said. "It is an individual sport, typically, but this team is so supportive and unified in that it's not just about your ride, it's about the team. It's nice, I think, for all of us who have done this growing up, to have a team aspect to it. I think that's why a lot of us do it."
