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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The riders weren’t listening to the instructions. Period. The issue wasn’t the “buttery soft” horse responses.
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George Morris had very successful students. He also intentionally hurt them. Both horses and students.
One should never flip a horse over backwards. One should not express that in the situation the kid was in that in that situation that they would have flipped a horse over backwards.
There is no value to that teaching statement. To a child/youth/whatever. Period.
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Blocked.You complained endlessly about CH on the Barisone threads and here you are doing exactly the same thing.
Life’s too short to read this malarkey!
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Devastation has now settled within my heart. Hug LK for me. Tell her I said hi!
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Every day I ask, why is this so hard?!
(Boilerplate) While I believe firmly that these riders are grownup enough and educated enough to understand hyperbole – and experienced enough to withstand some pressure (say what you will about the Big Eq, I have a lot of respect for the Finals alumni)…
Some things maybe do come with age and experience. As a re-rider flummoxed by the short circuits between my head and my body, I have spoken up in a lesson and said something along the lines of “I hear you. I am not ignoring you [because this has almost become a running joke in my group of adults]. I’m just struggling with making this happen. What can I do?”
As a teenager and an early 20-something, I don’t think it would occur to me to say that. I tended to keep my mouth shut. But I’m also in that weird place as a re-rider in terms of the trainer/authority figure relationship.
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Didn’t Dominic Gibbs move across the county to be a working student for her, too? I seem to remember reading a profile where, as a kid basically, speaking of, he even lived in a camper or something for a while on her farm.
I was wildly impressed at what it must’ve taken to do that.
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This^.
Having been an elite athlete as well as trainer - athletes, particularly younger athletes, will not necessarily speak up when struggling to complete a skill set. The older I get, I will not hesitate to speak up and communicate my concerns, frustrations, etc.
And a gentle reminder for those in the back: these kids will not speak out regarding the trainers because they are afraid of jeopardizing their potential selection for US teams.
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I think he did spend some time at Plain Bay right after he got out of the junior division. And it was certainly a huge part of Beezie Madden’s foundation, I believe.
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Literally just turned on CMH in time to miss Amira Kettenah and Nashville Hero in the FEI BrainJuice U25 Grand Prix at WEF – didn’t someone say that was her mount during this clinic.
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The amount of people continuing to put words in these kids’ mouths and insisting they know their innermost thoughts is nuts. If they felt unfairly treated in the clinic then I do hope they will speak up, and USEF has avenues in which you can do that discreetly. But their silence is not proof of anything. Neither that they were maligned nor that they weren’t.
We just cannot know, so I really struggle to understand why the Internet is absolutely insistent that these kids should be huddled in corners forever scarred by their run-in with the Big Ol’ Mean Olympian. Why are you demanding fragility from these young adults who are about to venture off into a tough & frequently unforgiving world?
Honest to the gods, what the internet mob has done to these kids is far, far more disruptive than Katie’s wildest hyperboles.
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Maybe because some of us have been in this position.
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God, this has been driving me insane. It is such an outrageously self-centered perspective to claim to know what these kids are going to take away and “remember most” from this clinic. Stop projecting. Just because YOU wouldn’t thrive in a clinic like this, doesn’t mean that other riders wouldn’t or didn’t. There are many of us in this thread who took the time to watch the WHOLE CLINIC and decided that Katie’s teaching and communication style is, on the whole, excellent and we would metaphorically give our right arms for the chance to ride in this setting with her.
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And? Plenty of people have been in these positions; there is no proscribed, universal response.
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Wow. And so that makes it ok for this type of misconduct to continue? To go ahead and excuse her method of instruction?
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Yes? Because it wasn’t misconduct? And some people find this ‘firm, but fair’ style of instruction helpful?
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I have tried to type several responses. None are even worth it.
If this is the level of offense that is making us grab our pearls, God help these kids in the real world.
I’m grateful that I grew up when I did, and that I was raised in a household where it was expected you would buck up and grind when it got tough or when someone said something you didn’t like (note, that doesn’t mean confront them), because it set me up for lifetime success. The alternative, looking for stuff to be offended by or taking a snippet of a whole comment and getting twisted up about it, is not conducive to… well, anything worthwhile.
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I’m not sure the notion of a clinic as a clinic has gotten its due.
There was a Tamarack Hill FB post that touched on this. Clinics aren’t longterm relationships. They’re a new and different perspective.
I don’t necessarily expect someone to have the fine skills of an educator for me to learn something from them as a rider.
I can survive 90 minutes with someone I don’t personally like or find pleasant in their communications style if there’s something to be gained.
Now, if somebody is a raging a*****e, unreasonable, or putting participants in a dangerous situation, that’s different. But in the long run, I don’t think they’re going to get many gigs as a clinician.
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