Caitlin Ward: Too Young to Be a Professional

This week on The Equitas Podcast, Sarah speaks with Caitlin Ward who has been paid to ride since 2023, yet she still hesitates before calling herself a professional.
To get some background on Caitlin you can see her recent feature article HERE.

On Australia's Gold Coast, Caitlin runs a riding business built almost entirely on word of mouth, in a sport she describes as genuinely saturated. Getting noticed, she tells Sarah, is less about marketing and more about who vouches for you. It's a candid account of what building a client base actually looks like when the industry is this crowded, and it doesn't flatter the process.

Then there is Jett. Caitlin calls him the horse who changed everything, and the story of how he came into her life starts somewhere nobody would choose to begin:

a coach who wouldn't sell him to a junior rider, and a warm-up where, in her own words, "he would try and kill you, genuinely."

What he taught her afterwards is a different story, and one worth hearing in full.

Between the professional question she still can't answer easily and the horse whose story very nearly never started, this is a conversation about the gap between the plan and the reality, and what it actually takes to keep choosing this sport.