The school where it all takes place.
“Tresen” (トレセン) is a very transparent acronym of Training Center (トレニンーグセンター) and it’s the name of the main school where Uma Musume takes place.
It’s not the ONLY training center of its kind however. There’s many training centers around the country and around the world, Tresen just happens to be the main, prestigious one in Japan. Some scenes in Cinderella Gray even stylize the name as 中央 to illustrate that it’s the central circuit.
Of course, as you might suspect, there is actually a Training Center by the JRA in the real world. It’s an establishment that includes… basically everything you see in the game and anime save for the compulsory education. From pools to train stamina, to different kinds of courses to practice. There’s even living quarters fit for humans given that the trainers and related staff have to live somewhere nearby.
In Uma Musume, there’s two dormitories, the Ritto dorms managed by Fuji Kiseki, and the Miho dorms managed by Hishi Amazon. These are based on the two training centers east and west of the central racing district.
Miho is the bigger one of the two and houses mainly horses that belong to the Kanto region, meanwhile Ritto houses mainly horses from stables of the Kansai area.
The dorms and roommates are a whole thing worth its own post, but for now I can confirm that yes, they do line up with their real life counterparts.
On that note, something I’ve always liked about this specific academy is that, unlike a few other boarding school types in media, this one is shown to be explicitly in an inhabited area. It sounds like a small thing, but you don’t realize how many Special Academies are isolated from the rest of the world until one of them has easy access to city amenities.
Education in Tresen is an interesting affair. For one there’s material that describes it as “Schools and Colleges” and it’s not clear if Tresen is an escalator school where girls go from middle school to college, or if there’s branches of Tresen that cover college education.
My personal theory so far is that Tresen covers college education also within its campus or at the very least accomodates students that go through it.
My rationale for this is that, as mentioned before, Maruzensky is old enough to have a drivers license, and she and Mr. CB are explicitly labeled as living in their own rooms instead of having rommates. Not only that, but the constant managing and paperwork that Rudolf does as Student Council President lies in this weird middle ground. It’s too realistic a busywork to be just some “fantasy student council with too much power”, if you told me she was getting a degree in management or something similar and handling affairs on the student side helped her towards that, I would believe it.
I would also bring up that Sirius Symboli is old enough not only for Star Blossom’s Tsubaki to have seen her run when she was a student, but also to have a license to pilot small aircrafts, but unlike Maruzensky she does have a roommate in Nakayama Festa, so…
Theories aside, the point is that Tresen covers everything save for elementary school education. The curriculum is the same you’d see in any other compulsory education establishment with the same basic subjects, though Tresen adds training theory for any girls that hopefully land a trainer.
Oh yeah, not every student will land a trainer, and not every girl will get their Twinkle Series run before graduating. But for those that do, the academy lets them do… whatever they want, kinda.
The academy’s policy on training is to leave it up to the girls and the trainers, there’s no “standard training curriculum” for any of them since it needs to be able to account for any number of physical conditions like more limited running time or maybe a shift in distance goals. This is also why to join the Twinkle Series you need a trainer.
There’s actually one training scenario that explores this, though. And while I don’t wanna be sidetracked with it here specifically, its ultimate conclusion is that “freedom of training” means the freedom to apply a more structured training if it’s something the girl would benefit from.
And with this we’ve covered the more outstanding broad concepts I believe, outside of the odd loose end here and there. So for the next post I think it’s important to understand how the franchise has evolved with these concepts.