BY MEGHAN MACKEY, INTERNET MANAGER
 |
| IE Sumthing earned a big pat from catch rider Linda Crothers on their way to collect the green working hunter world championship trophy. |
Linda Crothers gives a one-word answer when asked what it's like to come to a show like the AQHA World Championship Show not knowing much about the horses she’s about to ride: challenging.
But that’s the way of the catch rider. Sometimes you have a few days, sometimes just a few minutes to get to know the horse you’re about to ride.
“Everybody has their own style of riding that works for them,” Linda said. “You kind of have to adapt to each horse’s feel. There are a couple little things you can pick up on.”
Linda said each horse tells her what they want when she gets on.
“If I can get a nice canter, a nice rhythm, the jumps pretty much come up,” she said. “Then I check the lead change, make sure I’ve got the lead change. They’re all a little different as to how they like to change leads, so I kind of have to adapt to each one.”
Linda has ridden plenty of horses that have given her the experience to back her up when she gets on a horse she has never ridden before.
“I’ve been riding since I was little tiny,” she said. “My mom set me on a pony before I could walk, and I’ve been riding all my life. I’ve been catch riding since I was a kid on ponies and doing that stuff.
“You ride a lot of horses. Some are good, some are bad, but you learn something from every one of them.”
Linda isn’t sure where she’s off to after the World Show -- maybe Florida with Sandy Vaughn, who got Linda several rides at the World Show that resulted in two world championships in the working hunters. She laughed when she said maybe she’d just go back into retirement.
“Sandy kind of brought me out of retirement,” she said. “I told Sandy, I think I’ll go back to retirement for a couple of years now, but no, I won’t do that. I’ll keep at it again. I enjoy it.
“I feel fortunate that I can get on a horse and kind of get in there and figure it out in a couple of rides, couple of jumps,” she said. “It’s challenging but it's fun. Its quite a rush to be able to pull that off.”
