Area V Young Rider Katie Resnick has been selected to represent the United States in the dressage competition at the 2015 European Maccabi Games in Berlin this summer, and we are excited she has agreed to blog about her journey! Meet Katie and Amanda Katsman, her teammate and best friend, here and read on for her first blog about finding motivation and silver linings.
Katie Resnick and her mare The King’s Spirit. Photo by Jeff Resnick.
I met my Maccabi Games teammate Amanda Katsman at the tryouts for Texas A&M’s equestrian team, when neither of us knew that the team was only looking for hunter/jumper riders. As you know, I am an eventer, and she is a dressage rider. So unfortunately, while the coaches acknowledged we are both accomplished in our respective disciplines, we did not make the cut.
Freshman year was a big transition for me. I really wanted to get used to the aspects of college life such as learning to live by myself, learning how to study correctly, and having a social life (something you don’t have much of in high school when you compete at the upper levels). So my horse stayed back home in Dallas, and she was leased by the girl who groomed for me at Young Riders. She competed her at a CCI* and they did very well.
In the meantime in College Station (the city where Texas A&M is located), after being away from riding for only a short time, I decided that I wanted to do whatever was in my power to ride on the A&M Equestrian Team next year. At a school of 50,000 undergraduate students, I wanted to stand out. There is no better way than to represent the school than by being on the equestrian team and competing in the SEC.
So, second semester, I began to ride horsemanship. Horsemanship is similar to western dressage. NCAA Equestrian teams consist of equitation over fences, equitation on the flat (which I tried out for), horsemanship and reining. In my early years of riding, I rode western, and it wasn’t until I was about 10 years old or so that I found that eventing was what I wanted to do.
When I rode western, I did everything — western pleasure, showmanship, barrel racing, poles, horsemanship, reining, cutting, pretty much anything you can name. So come second semester of school, my parents knew how much I still wanted to be on the team. My dad suggested going back to my roots and seeing if I could switch over from English to western. So, for the past four months, I have been training with Coach Beth Bass, who has been the horsemanship coach at Texas A&M for the past nine years.
It is so cool riding another discipline, and I remember David O’Connor saying at the North Texas Eventing Association/Area V banquet last year how important it is to ride other disciplines. For me, riding horsemanship has really improved my seat and my upper body. I am going to tryout again for the equestrian team come September, but for horsemanship and not equitation.
The name of the game in horsemanship is how do I complete the whole pattern effortlessly and do everything while it looks like I’m doing nothing. I’m really working on separating my lower body from my upper body and keeping that upper body completely stable. It’s been a hard transition because in eventing dressage we get away with so much because they really judge the outcome of the horse more because there are a lot of different ways to get the right stuff out of a horse.
In horsemanship, they judge you and the horse as a pair but they are very much focused on your riding skills. Since you only get a four-minute warmup on a horse you’ve never ridden, it’s hard to really judge the horse because it can have so many things wrong with it before you ride it. This tests your diversity as a rider along with your technique. Sometimes a great rider will draw a not so great horse and still come out with the winning score because she rode well. It’s such an interesting twist on things!
I believe that horsemanship will really help my dressage for the Maccabi Games, and not just in my position, but also in my diversity as a rider. In NCAA equestrian competitions, riders from each school draw names of horses out of a hat. Two riders will compete on the same horse, and each gets a four-minute warm up on the horse before they go in and show it.
Then the rider who got the higher score gives the point to their school, and the school with the most points wins. So the warm-up procedure and getting to know your horse is very similar to the way it will be at Maccabi. I am much more confident about my ability to ride different horses because I’ve been doing horsemanship.
Click here and here to watch videos of Katie demonstrating horsemanship patterns. EN recommends always wearing a helmet while mounted. Katie is organizing a small auction in her hometown of Dallas to raise money for the trip. Direct donations can also be made by clicking here. Search for Kathryn Resnick.
