How we all come to find our trainers is a personal journey. Some folks get it right right off the bat, but more often than not, we’ve all kissed a few frogs along the way to finding our educational Prince (or Princess!) Charming, and we’ve also inevitably outgrown perfectly good programs and needed to seek out something, someone else.
I see lots of folks out there getting downright bad help, and I’m always struck by why anyone would tolerate trainers who tell them they’re stupid, or trainers who are awful riders, or trainers who are bad to their horses. But I also see lots of folks out there who don’t get enough help, and I wonder if it’s because they don’t know they need more help, or if they don’t know how to find more—or better quality–training.
When searching for a coach or trainer, here are some things I encourage folks to consider.
1. Has your coach done what you want to do? This seems like a no-brainer, but I can’t tell you how many riders I meet in clinics who are riding with people who haven’t competed at the level they themselves are striving to compete, or ever dealt with a horse or rider issue like the one their student is experiencing. Whether that’s youth riders with the NAJYRC working with trainers who’ve never shown the FEI levels, or adult amateurs working on bringing their horses up the levels working with coaches who’ve only ridden trained horses themselves, if your coach hasn’t done what you want to do, look elsewhere.
2. Has your coach taught someone else to do what you want to do? This is not an automatic dismissal necessarily—I was once a 23-year-old kid out on my own, who’d never had a student riding at the FEI levels; someone had to be my first. But think long and hard about whether you want to be that trainer’s “crash test dummy.” I know lots of young and ambitious people who’ve ridden the upper levels on a schooled horse who set out their shingle, and I’m watching their students get burned badly by those young trainers’ lack of experience. We all learn by making mistakes—I did too!—but do you want to be the one on whom that trainer gets their mileage?
3. Has your coach made a horse? Horses are expensive, and particularly when a trainer is riding horses owned by other people, we don’t always get a say in when our career with said horse is over; they can get sold or taken away from us before we’ve had a chance to finish them. But any trainer worth his or her salt has taken a horse from the relative beginning of his career up through at least a few of the levels. If the trainer you’re considering hasn’t, if they all rock the young horse or lower levels and then are never seen or heard from again, keep looking. Even if your goal is to just be the World Champion of the World at Training Level, get help from someone who’s gone beyond that themselves.
4. Does your coach still get regular help himself? No one knows everything; the best riders in the world still have regular eyes on the ground. If your coach isn’t getting regular coaching from their coach, keep looking. And “regular help” shouldn’t mean clinics with any passing person—it is crucial that all of us, amateurs and professionals, young and old, have meaningful training relationships with a primary coach. The hit-or-miss approach of taking a lesson from Mr. X here and Ms. Y there creates a jumbled puzzle, not a cohesive training philosophy.
5. Is your trainer still actively competing? Here’s another one that’s not necessarily a deal breaker, because there are plenty of incredible trainers who ain’t as young as they once was, or who are having kids and growing families, and who are backing off on their riding and competing, letting some of their riding and competition duties to fall on the shoulders of their employees and assistants instead. But I always panic when I hear any variation on a theme of: “Well, I don’t believe in competition. I believe in just developing horses for the good of the horse.” That’s all well and good, but we are playing a sport here. Even if you have no interest in competing yourself, I think that trainers who are still actively involved in competitive horse sport are held much more accountable to doing it right; it’s easy to get convinced of your own divine rule when you’re only riding at home in your backyard.
The caveat to this is, of course, trainers who work with approaches or disciplines that don’t have a competitive element, like trainers who back babies to make them useful citizens with no particular discipline in mind, or trainers who specialize in bombproofing or one of the “natural horsemanship”-esque approaches. I have no dog in that fight, and these folks serve an incredibly important purpose in the horse world, taking on some of the nonsense that even pretty brave trainers like me want no part of. I guess I’d be more encouraged by a trainer who specializes in that stuff but still has something they’re getting out there and competing on, if only because it shows that they can take the rogues and make them useful.
6. When you watch your trainer ride, are you inspired? Do you want to ride like your coach? We aren’t all six feet tall and willowy, and not too many people can equitate beautifully on a young horse with no balance, but if your trainer spends all his or her time staring at their rides’ necks, or flops like a trout out of water, or has a rearing fit with every horse in the barn, or leaves whip marks on everythings’ sides every day, I’d move along.
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7. Is your trainer actually advancing you, or just giving you busywork? Busywork isn’t necessarily a sin—there are, bless them, lots of not-very-talented and/or brave and/or diligent students who really like to ride, and really like lessons, but don’t really like knuckling down and making progress, and for those students, lessons filled with nothing but a constantly revolving string of exercises might be just what the doctor ordered. But if all of your trainers’ students are still doing the same level, year after year, it may be a sign of trouble.
All that said, a few things to bear in mind: first, we shouldn’t judge a trainer by any one individual student, good or bad. I know plenty of wretched trainers who’ve got one wunderkind student who, in spite of them, is succeeding; after all, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. And the same is true of the riders who just aren’t gifted, but who are doing their best, plugging away at it with a coach who wants the best for them.
8. Does your coach understand your limitations, and want to work with your plan, assuming it’s a reasonable one? Sure, it’d be swell if everyone could own a half-dozen horses, keep them all in full training, and just cheerfully advance up the levels. But here on planet Earth, we’re hindered by finances, by time, by the health of our horses’ bodies and our own. Your coach has to understand whatever you’re bringing to the table, and work within it.
My students run the gamut from the very well-off with plenty of resources at hand, to those scrimping and saving for the periodic lesson on a very low-budget horse, and everything in between. When I’m working with my riders on a budget, I work with them to try and identify where they should be spending their money, and when. For example, a client with a young horse might be better off sending the horse for a few weeks of steady training, instead of two lessons a week, while going through a doofus young horse stage. Another client might be able to save a little cash by taking fewer lessons and focusing on fitness during the hot summer months, or once they’ve accomplished their goals for their Spring season and are just biding their time until the fall Championships, or whatever.
Your coach also needs to respect your horse. If your horse is suitable for what you want to do, your trainer shouldn’t be trying to sell you a new one. Yes, the average Warmblood horse is going to outscore the average Thoroughbred or Quarter Horse in dressage, but that doesn’t mean that your Thoroughbred, Quarter Horse, Pintabian-Mustang-Quarab-Wombat cross, or whatever you’ve got isn’t still worth working with, as long as you’re still wanting to work with it.
That said, there’s lots of reasons for a good coach to tell you it’s time to move on from your horse, which brings me oh-so-cleverly to the next section of this blog: things that aren’t necessarily a dealbreaker, and things that absolutely are.
– If your trainer is telling you that you need to get rid of your horse and get something else, she might be out to get your money… or she might have your best interests at heart. If your trusted trainer thinks your horse is dangerous, listen to her. If she says that you’ve reached his capacity and that continuing to push on him might hurt your horse, she’s telling you the truth. If I tell a client it’s time for a new horse, I am not then expecting the client to drop six figures on the next one; a good trainer can find a horse suitable to any given person and that person’s goals in just about any price range. I’ve even told my clients to spend less money on their next horse—more money doesn’t necessarily mean better, or more appropriate.
– The same is true of veterinarian visits, of more training, or of an equipment upgrade. Yes, lots of riders work with saddle companies, but some of us actually know a thing or two about saddles, and if your saddle is causing you a problem, we’d be in the wrong to NOT tell you. If we think your horse is struggling because of a health issue, you want us to tell you. If we really think your horse would benefit from a few—or more than a few—training rides with us, we should be able to suggest it. There are absolutely trainers out there who just want your money, but I’ve truthfully met very, very few. The horse business is a crappy way to get rich quick, and since all we have is our reputations, the stakes are way, way too high to get a bad one by screwing our clients.
– Staff turnover isn’t necessarily a sign that a trainer is bad news. Being the barn help is a tough gig, and lots of young women make their way unto the world every year thinking that they’ll start as a working student and after two weeks they’ll have the keys to Valegro, only to burn out in six months, or less. (My record is six days, which I felt bad about, until I spoke to an extremely prominent coach who told me her record was 24 hours, so there’s that.)
This business ain’t for everyone, and lots of wonderful people leave it to make their careers elsewhere. That’s not necessarily a reflection on the trainers for whom they worked.
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Here are some of my dealbreakers:
– Horses in poor condition. There is absolutely no reason for a horse to be excessively thin, and while every horse gains and loses weight, and we’ve had more than a few horses come to us for training looking like they’d been through a war and we’ve wanted to hide them in the back until we’d had a chance to work our magic on them, if you walk down a trainer’s barn aisle and see stall after stall of skinny, dull-coated and poorly-groomed horses, move along.
– Equipment in poor condition. It’s not about having the newest, latest and greatest—it’s about keeping what you’ve got in good repair. A trainer’s tack should be clean and well-maintained. A trainer should be diligent about walking the fencelines to check for loose fence boards, and making sure hoses are wrapped up at the end of the day. If caring about a swept aisle is too hard, how can you trust a coach to care about your riding lessons?
– A slovenly look. It’s not about being dressed for a party every day, but if it would kill your coach to have on a collared shirt and a belt every day, or if his boots have holes or her hair is everywhere, it’s not a good sign about his or her ability to keep his or her life under control.
– An irresponsible social media presence. We are all entitled to our own lives, and to have our feelings on politics and religion, and to have a social life (and even photographic evidence of said social life). But if your trainer’s Facebook page is filled with pictures of her out for a wild night with her girls, or screaming “shares” of rants for or against whatever her politics lead her to, I’d run. (I also personally believe that anyone who “shares” something on Facebook without Googling to see if it’s actually true deserves 50 lashes with the Social Media Stick of Stupid, but that’s just me.)
– Trainers who insult you. If your coach calls you dumb, fat or useless, get out. (And kick him in the shins on your way out.)
– A poor ability to communicate. I’ll be the first one to admit that sometimes my email inbox swallows me whole, and I’m overly protective of my cell phone number, only giving it to clients and friends. But if your trainer is unreachable, or if your coach can’t put a sentence together on paper, it doesn’t matter if she’s the best rider or teacher in the world—she doesn’t have the kind of business skills she’ll need to make her business sustainable. Not every great trainer has to be Shakespeare as well, but he needs to be able to articulate himself with relative clarity.
– Drugs as a training tool. I am a big believer in Better Living Through Modern Chemistry when it comes to rehabbing horses from injury, and I keep a bottle of sedative for body clipping and the occasional dentist visit. But that’s the limit on where sedatives should be used. If your trainer won’t get on a horse without drugs, that’s not a good trainer. And let’s be clear—there are horses out there I won’t get on. But I won’t rely on drugs to make them ok to ride; I’ll tell you to find someone who specializes in the difficult cases. Sedatives aren’t training; they’re compromising. Not an option.
I know there are parts of the country that aren’t so lucky as to have a wide range of quality choices in looking for a trainer, but no matter where you are, don’t scrimp on your education—find the best coach you possibly can, and get as much help as you can fit into your life. It’s the only way to get anywhere!
