Put in a ride and the scoresheet that came with it. I'll score it blind, then we open the envelope together and you find out how badly I did. When I'm wrong, you train me.
USEF Chapter WD
Training materials
Rides
Start with a ride you already have a scoresheet for. Those are the valuable ones — a scored ride is the only kind where I can find out whether I was right.
The one that is worth most: a ride with two judges’ sheets on it. Two judges have marked two different rides of yours, so I cannot yet tell a strict judge from my own bad marking. One ride scored by two people settles that, and it is worth more than anything I could change in the scoring.
| Rider & horse | Test | Filmed | Where it is | Rulebook | Scoresheet | Judge | Me | Miss | Trained |
|---|
The mailbox
Leave a note on a ride, put something on the barn board, or talk to me. When I change how I mark something I will tell you here, and I will show you what changed and why rather than just handing you a different number.
| Movement | Me | Judge | Gap |
|---|
Straight off the phone is fine — don't convert anything.
§8.2 · Zoom, and it is the one that costs marks. Horse and rider should fill a quarter to a fifth of the screen. “Most people are not using enough zoom and they don’t zoom fast enough.” No zoom → capped at 6.
§8.1 · Pan with the horse. “They want to be panning, following you.” Stand at or just behind C, raised about 18 in for the judge’s eye height, and keep the horse in the last third of frame with two-thirds ahead of it for depth perception.
§8.7 · The horse may never leave the frame, not for a second — that is elimination. No cuts. An in-video sign is required.
§8.5 · Markers big, bright, and turned toward the camera — road cones or painted buckets, not small white letters facing the rider. Corners must be clearly delineated with two poles each. Without markers she declines to assess size at all.
§8.6 · A ring slightly too small is acceptable (it is harder); too wide is disqualified. H/M/K/F must be the correct distance from the corner; E and B centred; the rest proportional.
§8.3 · The whole arena does not need to be in view.
§8.4 · The basics. Landscape, highest camera resolution, full battery, clean lens. Avoid shooting into the sun — the reins vanish — and a dark horse against trees vanishes too.
§8.8 · Grass is fine if it is mown, and mowing the centreline shorter is legal and helps.
§8.9 — not about filming, but hers: drag the centreline with a rake to practise on and to check your straightness afterwards. It is how she checks her own.
Quoted from centerline/docs/NORRIS-candidates.md §8 — “a specification from the judge herself”.
Attaching to this ride.
Photos of the paper are perfect. If the sheet runs onto a second page, add both — the movements are usually on the front and the collectives and the judge's remarks on the back, and I read them together as one card. I'll take the marks, the coefficients, the collectives and the judge's written comments off them — the test's structure comes from the sheet, not from me guessing at it.
Tap a page to choose a photograph. Most WDAA sheets are two pages — the movements on the front, the collectives and the judge's remarks on the back. Send both and I read them as one card.