WWU Summer Riding Camp - A Stablehand's Perspective

Over the summer, just like most college students, I got a job.  I had the opportunity to work with the horses at William Woods.  It ended up being a pretty rough summer, but that’s a different story.  The barn on-campus functions a lot differently over the summer than during the semester because all the students are gone.  For the summer, a lot of the horses leave campus.  They either go out to pasture or get leased out to a summer home.

Needless to say, there is not a lot of activity over the summer, just a lot of work to be done.  But for two weeks during the summer, a summer horse camp is held.  The first week of camp is for older kids between the ages of 14-17.  The second week is for kids between the ages of 8-13.  For the two weeks of camp a good number of horses come back.  We had about 40+ horses to take care of during camp compared to the 20+ there were (and there were only three workers taking care of all of them), this makes summer camp hard for the workers but it is a great time for the kids!

Photo Credit: William Woods University

The kids arrived for camp on Sunday evening and left on Friday at noon.  During the day activities are planned for the kids to participate in.  Because I worked in the barn with the horses I can only talk about summer camp purely from the barn perspective, but I do know that they do other activities outside of the barn with their counselors.  Each morning, the students arrived at the barn around 8 AM with the first lesson starting at 8:30.  There were ridings lessons every day and each discipline had a show during the week.  In between each of the lessons the kids cleaned their horse’s stall.  After each lesson, the kids were responsible for taking care of their horse and cleaning their tack.  In the evening, the students would come to the barn and help feed the horses at night.  By the end of camp, the kids had learned and lot and had a great time!