IN late February, Trinity College hosted its annual inter-school Gymkhana as 122 horse riders from 36 schools across the state descended on Gawler.
Trinity College’s equestrian co-ordinator and coach Helen Barnes said the day was a rousing success, with her team taking top honours after entering its most participants in school history.
“This year Trinity put forward a team of 40 riders, which was a record for the school,” she said.
“The other schools float all their own horses from far-and-wide to get here, while Trinity, with the horsemanship program that I run, use our school horses – we’re the only school in South Australia that actually has horses for the students to learn to ride on.
“We are state-of-the-art as far as South Australian equestrian is concerned, and we won the day with a score of 72, with the closest to us being Seymour College on 60 points.”
Trinity cut no corners in producing a quality event, even recruiting veteran voices of the sport to add real expertise.
“We were lucky enough to have Bob Robbins as our commentator, and he actually does all the commentating for the Royal Show, so that was brilliant,” Barnes said.
“We actually had an Equestrian Australia accredited and World Cup show-jumping rider, Jonathan Farrington, build and judge our show-jumping course, and we had Royal Show quality judges too.”
It was another popular edition of the event that has been running for over 30 years, with more expansion possibly on the cards in the future.
“I’ve had nothing but good feedback,” Barnes said.
“As with everything in life, you aim for perfection, and every year we try and just tweak a few little things to improve on the whole… it’s an ongoing evolution of ours as much as anything else.
“I’ve had emails, lots of people came and thanked me on the day, we fortunately had beautiful weather and it was catered for with food and coffee for everyone, so it was fantastic.”