Accidentally managing a youth club, and everything else I wish I'd known about RDA coaching before I got totally hooked on it

Presenting Endeavour awards to one of our classes at Aim RDA

I wrote a blog post four years ago: "Ten things nobody told me about becoming a coach". I still agree with all ten points, especially one, four, five, and ten. Four years, hundreds of RDA sessions and a whole new group later, the topic has come round again: in my own thoughts (even in my last post), and in light-hearted conversation with my peers. I'm not saying I was wrong in 2021: I'm just saying there are gaps. These are the gaps - some of them a bit strange - that I really wish someone had filled for me before I became truly bedded into the good, bad, and brazenly random of RDA coaching.

I'm going to start bold, with point 9 of my 2021 post: "it will make you a better person". Still agree. The most useful part of this not-given advice? It will make you a better person, but you might actually need to practice being selfish again from time to time. This is about boundaries: may you use them; may you respect them; may you cultivate them early. If you're the sort of person who decides to be a coach, you're probably also a generous person who struggles to know when to take a break from doing a good thing. I don't have enough fingers to count the number of RDA coaches who spring to mind when I say this...

Too much of a good thing: that way, madness lies. I have the same problem in my day job: you have to make your own boundaries somewhere, or you'll end up running yourself into the ground by doing nice things and making opportunities available. What nobody talks enough about is how many forms these boundaries actually need to have. How many things you could say "yes" to and how many things you should say "yes" to aren't always going to be the same number, and it isn't unkind to say "I can't do that" or "I don't think that's the right thing to do". Within Aim RDA, we're trying to be proactive, progressive, and participant led - people who say "yes". This actually makes the boundaries extra important: dreaming big in a reasonable and constructive way is harder than it looks.

My coach friends and I often discuss "The Guilt" that lurks when we put other plans above RDA, especially if our day off means burdening others. I wish someone had told me how much harder it is to take time off from a volunteer passion project than it is from an actual, salaried day job. I also wish that someone would tell present me, as well as past me, how to assuage that guilt. I think we're doing an OK job of building that into our group culture, but all of our coaches do still struggle with The Guilt, and it feels like we've tried everything except writing lines ("I will not apologise for wanting to go on holiday").

Emilia riding Larry

Next. Being a coach is much harder, for most people at least, than being a regular green-carded volunteer - even if it makes you twitch to ditch it for a weekend every now and again. It's not hard enough to put me off (obviously), but enough for it to be a bit of a slog some weeks to keep the right tabs on the right things, to do all the pre-planning and tick all the right boxes. The responsibility isn't right for everyone, and even if it's right for you, it won't always be fun. I don't love having to be the person to put things right at the end of the day when a bit of equipment hasn't been put in the right place, and I don't like having to be stern or strict with riders, their families, or other volunteers.

It can be a real pain to give time to keeping up your coaching requirements which doesn't even involve hanging out with horses - First Aid training springs to mind, although the most recent course I did had more laughs than usual. When you're at the stables, you have to be happy to do absolutely anything you'd ask another volunteer to do and then some. This is no bad thing, philosophically, but it can mean that you in fact end up doing all of these things and then some. As a coach, you are often the barrier between other volunteers and RDA politics and/or bureaucracy, which can mean absorbing a lot. Oh, and you never stop feeling like the absolute worst person ever when one of your riders falls off and you have to pick them back up again. I had my first couple of fallers in more than a year recently and yes, it still sucks.

This is so far a very poor advert for being an RDA coach. I have written way more about why it's a good thing, I promise. I think it was the good parts that revealed themselves to me early on - it's normal that challenges start to filter in the further you go into something. I also think I'm glad that I didn't know the full extent of the best parts right at the beginning: discovering how deep a passion like this can run, or how intensely fulfilling or exciting being a coach can be didn't deserve to be spoilered. 

I do wish I'd been warned that not everyone would get it. As a student doing my coach training, missing a big Friday night for an early Saturday morning at the yard definitely stirred up confusion among my peers. I often have to reduce my explanation of my out-of-work commitments to the most fleeting of elevator pitches: "I teach disabled people to ride horses". That's enough for most people - I get a mild "that's a nice thing to do" and they move on. If I'm talking about the complexities of organising something, even if it's just a regular weekend at the stables, I will sometimes get a "that sounds like a lot of effort". Not everyone is going to get it - although yes, it is a lot of effort. It makes the relationships with people who really do get it all the more special.

Young volunteers in action during a session with blind rider Dayzie

So, what about the "youth club"? This is a bit of an exaggeration - I don't run an actual, official one, so please don't contact me asking to book in your child (please). A side effect, however, of making Saturdays my regular RDA day for almost fourteen years is that I've come into contact with a lot of young volunteers. It took me at least the decade to work out that most adults actually wanted their weekends for fun and spontaneous and relaxing things, and RDA didn't cover all three of those bases on a regular basis. Still makes recruitment and retention a bit of a headache, but I do accept it. Learning to love the mentorship side of working with an often majority school age team has taken me a little bit longer. There's a lot of teaching, leadership, mentorship and supervision involved, which exists beyond the coach-participant relationships which are at the front of most would-be coaches' minds.

No matter how loyal I am to my young volunteers, I've definitely had days at the yard tearing my hair out because I'm the only person aged over seventeen and don't have the time, energy, or infrastructure to provide the right sort of continuous training and support to them - not alongside doing a good job of coaching my actual lessons and everything else on the list. I have also had days where I'd just like to not have to explain, correct, or chivvy. I have definitely learned the hard way that my fifteen year old self was both the same as and very, very different to most of the teens I see at RDA, and was humbled and horrified by the first twenty times a young volunteer came looking for an adult's permission or advice and realised that I was the adult they were looking for. I have also learned that visiting a motorway service station which contains a Costa and a KFC on the way home from the stables is basically a spiritual experience.

As with everything, mindset helps. My fellow Saturday coach at Aim RDA has always loved supporting younger and less experienced volunteers around the yard, and I've actually always loved coaching young adults in RDA sessions. Some of my best ever volunteers have started helping in RDA sessions when they were fourteen or fifteen, often with limited or no experience of horses, and it can be really special to be in a strong team which is balanced across age groups. It also helps that I am very fond of, and very invested in, my committed young volunteers. I want them to fulfil their potential and to develop a relationship with the organisation that runs as deep as mine does. I want them to enjoy themselves and feel proud of making a difference. And actually, considering how many things they could choose to be doing instead of RDA on a Saturday afternoon, it is flattering that they claim to love it so much. Some of them even laugh at my jokes.

One of the best compliments we've received about Aim RDA in its history so far is that we represent "the future of RDA". The reality is, that future hinges massively on the engagement and support of our youngest volunteers. They can need a lot from us, but we need them too. As someone who's been the young adult with no peer group at RDA, I love having adult friends who are at a similar life stage to me and who understand why I do what I do. I have, however, found it increasingly rewarding to extend my remit as a coach to developing young volunteers. They do make me feel very old, and sometimes drive me up the wall, but there's a lot of fun, laughter and achievement to be had too - and a few jokes about "India's got the youth club in again" when I find seven cackling teens sat watching my last lesson of the day with their energy drinks I disapprove of so loudly. I just wish somebody had given my nineteen year old self a bit of a poke and told her "learn to love Year 9s sooner rather than later".

This idea of peer groups and balancing the social parts of being a coach brings me to the last thing I really wish I'd known about RDA coaching before I got hooked in: you're allowed to want what you want from it. I've had a few wry comments batted my way over the years about how "you're looking forward to the parties at Nationals" - imagine these volunteers wanting to have fun, eh? - or more barbed ones about the things I've wanted to do as part of my coaching. The longer I coach, the more I realise that it's no bad thing for me to have my own interests, preferences, or things I enjoy: I'm the one putting the hours in, and getting a lot done, fairly well, in those hours.

I'm not saying I show up to RDA on Saturdays with a twenty page rider listing all of my must haves and do nots, or that a little of flexibility and open-mindedness doesn't go a long way in an organisation like ours. I am saying it's fine for me to be, for example, interested in coaching riders who are a little bit older; or coaching for progress through regular competitions (one of my favourite challenges); or to have a particular interest in coaching visually impaired riders. It's even more fine for me to say that I want a weekend off here, that I need to recruit more adult volunteers there, or that yes, I really do enjoy a good knees up with lots of laughs with my RDA friends (one day I will do the worm successfully). I'm in an exciting position as a coach and trustee to be able to make the experience fun and rewarding, for me and for others, and it's OK for me to have opinions about what that means. I wouldn't change a thing about the experience of discovering how great some of these things are for the first time, but being willing and open-minded doesn't mean you don't get to be you.

What every burgeoning RDA coach needs in their life is for someone to tell them, very sternly, "This is for you too. Make sure it's serving you." If there's one thing I really needed to bed in at the start of my coaching career, it's probably that. The fact that I ended up with a car full of young volunteers every weekend who have nicknamed themselves my "gremlins"; the fact that I'd never sleep more than about twelve hours total during any given Nationals weekend; and the fact that it'd take me years to work out that self-sufficiency isn't always the aim... they were fine to leave as fun surprises. And finally: if you don't like learning new things, through fun surprises or otherwise, this definitely isn't the thing for you.

August riding Red