true
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Many here will be in for a big surprise.
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For anyone who had questions about the correct way to adjust your stirrup length, Anne Kursinski shared this demonstration video again the other day.
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There is a reason why no one who participated or watched the entire clinic complained about it. The editor of the 2.5 minute video had to work hard to come up with 2.5 minutes worth of out of context content for the hit job. In other words, only 2.5 minutes out of 90 minutes were useful or potentially useful to the person wanting to make the instructor look as bad as possible. Unfortunately the people who have not seen the entire 90 minutes are presuming that the 2.5 minutes are just a taste of the full clinic, and do not realize that the lesson as a whole was a positive, productive session for the horses and riders.
What I have not seen talked about yet is the collateral damage that the 2.5 minute video is doing to the clinic participants who are professionals and future professionals. In an effort to make Katie look as bad as possible, the content creator made the participants look as bad as possible in their personally-motivated quest to get Katie canceled. I would be so mortified if someone stringed together all of my mistakes made during clinic in effort to make the clinician look as bad and then shared it all over social media. If that is not internet bullying, I don’t know what is. In the responses to the 2.5 minute video by people who have not watched the entire lesson, a few posters upthread and several of you-tube response videos are concluding that the participants were underprepared and not up to caliber, and some people have even suggested on you tube that the participants whose mistakes were highlighted in the video should have been excused from the clinic altogether! What the people making such comments would see if they watched the entire lesson is that each and every participant was competent and had a successful day, even though they made a mistake here and there. Mistakes are part of the learning process! What the 90 minutes clearly demonstrates is that the participants processed and incorporated the Katie’s feedback and showed improvement during the course of the lesson! You can see each horse and rider improving and that they competently handled each of the exercises. No one was in over their head; no one deserved to be dismissed. The hit job video highlighting their mistakes shows abject callousness (and likely jealousy also) on the part of the creator of the video towards the participants. The video was cruel towards the students. I am ready to armchair diagnose that individual with antisocial personality disorder.
I have been shocked to witness some clinicians just standing there exclaiming “Good!” “Excellent!” “Perfect!” after every jump when the jump was anything but. Mollycoddling does not actually help the student or horse. In contrast, Katie’s instructions and guidance were effective in helping the students and horses improve and grow their partnership. I especially admired how she impressed upon the students the need for an adequate release over fences.
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Blah blah blah “If that were me, I’d flip the horse over backwards”.
The rest of the clinic doesn’t matter
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Somewhat ironic from a number of years ago
Albert Voorn agrees with Katie Prudent - Hunter/Jumper - Chronicle Forums (chronofhorse.com)
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Which minutes will be burned into the brains of the riders and horses after this clinic?
My guesses:
(1) The ones where the riders were repeatedly insulted as unintelligent, ungainly, scaredy-cats, etc; and
(2) The ones where the horses were being asked badly and answering clumsily, desperately, and the riders were (see (1) above).
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Lots of people agree on one thing then disagree on another.
I believe if people were to ask other horsepeople if it was bad (what she said) that many would agree with me. I see it all over.
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Of course! There are lots of horse people out there with strong opinions. Shoot, just look at the 800+ comments on the Chronicle’s Facebook page! This doesn’t surprise me at all. Doesn’t mean that I agree that this is worth a tarring and feathering either. 
But what do I know…
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Watch the 90 minutes and judge for yourself.
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It has become a difficult problem for USEF. On one hand, they dont want the “problematic” portions of the video to be more widely circulated. OTOH, by making it unavailable in context, even the members cannot see the whole session and judge for themselves. And those who are not competing members cannot see the sessions at all. Which leaves only the edited portions widely available.
I am only able to see the edited video. I thought, as presented, it showed really poor teaching technique. (which could have been from frustration as some have said there was much more before the chosen snippets, but I cant know)
It also struck me that if the riders were ill-prepared and couldnt tack up their own horses or shorten their leathers, the fault wasnt so much with them and “kids these days” as much as the trainers they had been working with.
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The mom/trainer of one of the participants in the clinic said in a Facebook post that claim was completely untrue.
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I just checked the USEF site. Gymnastics Group II is available, just not Group I at the moment.
If you just click play, it works. I’m not sure what the caption says, or why it’s in German for some reason.
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You can sign up for a free USEF fan membership, which allows you to link that account to CMH and watch there. I was able to watch the gymnastics session a week or so ago in the archives. Not sure if it is still available - I would double check but the TV is in use and I don’t want to interrupt.
Edit: Just checked and I can still access it when using the CMH app on the Firestick. And now I have the app on both TVs haha
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Like @MHM, it was working for me.
I’ve seen the red message in both German and English (same browser, same computer shrug) … in English, it says something to the effect of the video being unavailable because there’s a problem and they’re fixing it.
I have been (probably shrilly) taking every opportunity, including posting on my social accounts with settings on public, that the video works, please press ‘play!’ And if you need to, sign up for the CMH 30-day trial (lesser of the evils, friends) and press ‘play.’ Because I think it’s so important people who can watch the whole thing, do so before piling on. And that the impression that they’re not available is wildly unhelpful.
Someone (not me) was posting bootlegs on another platform. I don’t know if they’re still there or not, and after all my screeching, I’m certainly not advocating for violating TOS and IP whatnots but… just saying.
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It’s available right this minute for me after the usual runaround to get that site to work.
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I guess I dont know the correct path. I watched some live through USEF with fan membership but it denies access to archives unless “premium”
Something I’ve learned in my 25+ years of teaching is that if a student seems not to be listening:
- I’m not explaining myself well.
Distantly followed by:
-
They are trying and are having difficulty effecting the change.
-
They genuinely, physically did not hear me.
As to how hard is it to remember to halt on a straight line or keep your hands off the neck?Pretty damn hard, I’d say. Especially considering that the latter involves overpowering muscle memory ingrained over the course of thousands of repetitions. And to do it on the fly, in a performance situation, all while simultaneously juggling several other important things, including tactfully feeling out a new horse for some of them? If this sh-t were easy, everyone and their uncle would be out there doing it.
IMHO, truly great riding teachers all seem to understand on an intuitive level that the one thing that really matters is that the student feels safe in their hands. Building a great horse person involves offering ever-escalating situations of controlled risk. Every bolting horse stopped, every buck sat, every runout corrected, every schooling session where the choice is made to lose the battle to win the war another day. Every challenge handled successfully adds one more building block to the foundation. Great teachers understand where the edge is for each student. How far they can push without overfacing and destroying confidence. Get that dialed in and everything else will simply fall into place.
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For all those who say Katie is a terrible teacher, I’m just going to throw this out there.
The person who is showing the horses for Plain Bay now and winning all over the place went to work for them as a groom in early 2019. Within two years, she was starting to win Grand Prix classes by 2021. And last year she won almost half a million Euros in FEI ranked classes and ended up around the top 50 on the list of winning riders for 2023.
She did not learn to ride from scratch there, but she certainly did not come from an upper level program, either.
https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/catching-up-with-cathleen-driscoll/
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