IHSA & Collegiate Riders
Preparation for IHSA and collegiate riders, from a coach who ran a college program — in Whitehouse Station, Hunterdon County, forty minutes from most central New Jersey campuses.
Patti Zwaan served as Head Coach of the equestrian team at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. Through that work she coached students across the full range the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association throws together, from riders who had shown all their lives to riders who had sat on a horse a handful of times.
01 The format
Why IHSA needs different preparation
In IHSA you draw a horse you have never sat on, get no warm-up, and go. That rewards a completely different skill from the one most junior riders spend years building on a horse they know inside out.
What it rewards is adaptability: reading an unfamiliar horse in the first thirty seconds, adjusting your position to whatever way of going you have been handed, and staying effective when the horse does not answer the way yours does at home. Riders who arrive at college having only ridden one horse well are often surprised by how much this exposes.
That is what we work on. Riders school on different horses deliberately, including ones that do not suit them, because the whole point is learning to be effective on a horse who is not your favourite.
02 Riders
Who this is for
- Riders on a college IHSA team looking for coaching outside the school program
- High school juniors and seniors preparing to ride in college
- Students home for the summer who want to keep riding without shipping a horse
- Riders who joined a college team with little experience and are catching up
03 Logistics
Riding while at college
Term-time riding usually means lessons without owning a horse, which suits a student schedule and budget. Some riders take a half lease over the summer and go back to lessons in the autumn. Both work.
We are in Whitehouse Station, just off Route 78 in Readington Township, which puts us within reach of a good part of central and northern New Jersey.
Riding in college, or about to be?
Tell us where you are riding and what the team format is, and we will tell you what would help most.