Northern CA. "Judges Perspective Clinic" with Jan Englesma
Photographs and Article by Melissa Fischbach

    While other areas suffered heat over 100 degrees, our day dawned temperate in the mild 70's sunny with a light breeze. That was just one of the reasons I choose the beautiful historic coast town of Fort Bragg for the seminar. The facility was the beautiful privately owned "North Coast Training Center".
    I opened the clinic at noon, by passing out clip boards with Friesian information and blank lenier score forms, and then by introducing Mr. Jan Englesma as our attending clinician and specialist from the Netherlands I ended by thanking everyone for attending the CCFC hosted event. Mr Englesma, gave a brief about what he was going to address and what people could look forward to in this clinic, he then asked all auditors to introduce themselves and share how they initially became involved and interested in the Friesian breed. Interesting and sometimes amusing stories followed. Mr Englesma then spoke for two hours about the Friesian Breed, dilemmas, improvements, ideas, ideals, and challenged to audience to pick there brain's to answer and help with questions, comments and concerns. This was all riveting and informative; I think we could have easily gone for a couple more hours……. if stomachs had not started to grumble.
    After breaking for lunch, our first horse entered the arena. Mr Englesma, patiently and fully explained how the lenier score forms were filled out, how and on what the horses were judged and what was considered 'normal'. He took us step by step though the judging process and asked for an audience censes on the scores he gave as he filled in the form. We followed this with several more horses. Auditors then quietly and quickly became 'mock' judges and gave there own scores to the horses. These we then compared with Mr. Englesma's and any questions, concerns or comments were answered.
    At this point I must comment and applaud the owners for allowing their horses to be the 'guinea pig's for lots of straight forward conformational, conditional comments as people tried to learn. You all did extremely well and took it as a learning process not as 'insults' to your horse(s) thank you for that. It made the event very honest and fun. The day ended with all the older horses we had judged entering the arena. Mr. Englemas lined them up by order of preference. The only award owners received was a thank you for bringing their horses to participate, and tips for preparing their horses for the kuering.
    The following day commenced with a continuation of day one, with only two horses to be judged, followed by Mr. Englesma answering many more numerous questions. Mr. Englesma, traveled a long way to our small venue, not only coming all the way from the Netherlands, but also attending with Nina Miller ( thank you) who drove with him all the way from Los Angeles, to Northern Ca. an 11 hour drive!. (but that's a different story)
    I will conclude by stating a thank you to Mr. Englesma, you were a wealth of information, exceedingly patient, very clear and concise and showed great generosity and willingness to share. I hope we may have a repeat clinic one day in the near future, Thank you.

Clinic DVD is available go to FRIESIAN STORE