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![Allie Schmidt: A Resilient Role Model in Canadian Dressage [Athlete Profile]](/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/allie-1-1.jpg)
“In the womb,” is how FEI dressage trainer and athlete Allie Schmidt jokingly describes the start of her equestrian career. Allie’s mother has been an avid rider throughout her adult life and passed her passion for horses on to her daughter at an early age.
With strong family ties to equestrian sport, it’s unsurprising that Allie developed a strong connection with the horses that surrounded her. By her mid-teens, she was already running her own training program from her family’s barn in Campbellville, Ontario, and by the end of high school, she was competing at the FEI Junior level in dressage.
Today, Allie is an Equestrian Canada High-Performance Coach, athlete and trainer who shows at the national and FEI level – but her ascent to the upper ranks of dressage has been a hard-earned personal journey.
Discovering Dressage: Allie’s Journey Begins
Allie’s early riding experiences were centered around Pony Club and local shows, with her mother serving as her first coach. She enjoyed the thrill of jumpers and eventing, but found herself making quick work of the dressage ring.
She worked her way up to showing at First Level regionally and represented Western Ontario at the Canadian Pony Club National Dressage Finals twice.
A versatile rider, Schmidt kept her options open when she started riding a 2002 Hanoverian gelding named Walkin’ Shoes, a horse who would shape her career for years to come. “I tried him at eventing. He didn’t like that!” she laughs. After a similar experience in the jumper ring, she realized that ‘Shoey’, too, had a natural inclination for dressage.
Allie Schmidt and Walkin’ ShoesWith horse and rider skillsets aligned, Allie’s competition career continued its upward trajectory. Soon enough, the highest ranks of dressage were within her reach.
As fate would have it, Canadian Olympic and international Grand Prix rider David Marcus had a facility nearby, and Allie’s competitive spirit led her to pursue more serious dressage training. “If you want it, you have to go talk to him,” advised her mom, who encouraged young Allie toward self-determination.
After some attempts to contact the in-demand trainer, Allie’s persistence paid off when she spotted Marcus at a local show and approached him directly. “He had just jumped off a horse, still sweaty in his tailcoat. I was nervous!” she recalls.
Impressed by her initiative, Marcus agreed to take on the young rider.
With Marcus’ guidance, Schmidt’s dressage skills blossomed. Within a year, she was competing at First Level in Gold-rated shows in Ontario and, by age 18, had advanced to the FEI Juniors.
An Unexpected Challenge
As the talented rider moved up on the international stage, her outward success began to clash with private internal toil. The unguarded confidence that carried Allie’s early career forward quietly strained under the weight of growing expectation.
“It was not a good season,” she recalls of her first year on the FEI Junior circuit. “My scores got lower and lower with every show.” Allie was living in a self-fulfilling prophecy of anxiety that threatened her career just as it was taking off.
There were times Schmidt was tempted to quit and give in to the self-doubt that was plaguing her in the ring, but Allie broke the cycle.
She would gradually discover − through a combination of professional training, psychological support, and incremental competitive achievements − that the mental burdens of showing can be overcome.
As her confidence and joy of riding returned, so did her first-rate scores. Allie speaks passionately about her experience and is now a champion helping the next generation of young riders gain the confidence they need to thrive in and out of the ring.
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The Weight of Expectation: Navigating Performance Anxiety
Transitioning to international competition brought new challenges for Allie. Schmidt could ride alongside the best in her field, but internally, she recalls, “I had a lot of anxiety.”
Allie struggled with some of the changes her newfound success brought to her training regimen. “I differed from a lot of my show peers growing up because I often didn’t have a coach with me. I couldn’t always afford to bring one.”
As a rider used to coaching herself, taking responsibility for her own wins and losses was normal. Now, with the competition heating up, and Schmidt carrying a high-profile coach of her own, she could feel the mental strain.
“I discovered something about myself that season − it was getting coached that became really anxiety-provoking for me... I suddenly felt like I would make my coach look bad if I did poorly, which, paradoxically, made me do poorly.”
— Allie SchmidtMad Barn High Performance Athlete
Mastering the Mental Game
Recognizing the need for mental training, an 18-year-old Schmidt looked to a sports psychologist for help. “We did a lot of visualization, identifying triggers, and working to re-associate my triggers with something positive.”
She also learned to set process-oriented goals that put her on a step-by-step path of progress, rather than obsessing over uncontrollable outcomes.
The path forward was not always easy, Schmidt explains, but learning to communicate positive emotions to and from her horse in moments when they need each other most is the lesson she says was the most important.
“And now, I don’t really get anxious at all. It’s been really helpful,” Allie smiles.
Balancing Act: Education & Equestrian Entrepreneurship
Between classes and exams at Wilfred Laurier University, Schmidt forged the beginnings of her future business, Allie Schmidt Dressage, driving to meet her clients on a lesson-by-lesson basis.
It wasn’t long before Allie’s coaching career took a significant step forward. In 2016, she was offered the opportunity to run her school out of Winterwood Farms, a well-established equestrian facility near the university in Waterloo, ON.
Back on the Ontario Gold circuit, Allie Schmidt was steadily building a reputation as a coach and rider. In 2018 she rode four different horses to 42 podium finishes, half of which were winners. “That year, I was really starting to figure it out… especially in terms of learning how to manage my client’s horses,” she reflects.
Schmidt contrasts her experience as a Canadian coach where, “there isn’t really a guidebook on how to become a successful trainer,” with the more formal training and accreditation available in Europe. As an newer trainer in Canada, “You just have to kinda figure it out!” she says half-jokingly.
For all of Allie’s humility and grace, she certainly has figured it out. Schmidt currently manages more than 60 clients and their horses throughout the North American show season and remains an avid competitor herself.
Empowering Riders: Allie’s Holistic Approach to Coaching
Show stress is something many equestrians experience. Some riders even avoid showing altogether. As Allie now understands, re-focusing fear of failure into positive outcomes is a matter of mental preparedness.
As a victor in her own mental game, Schmidt is paying it forward. At Allie Schmidt Dressage she incorporates confidence building and goal setting into her curriculum. Her mission is to teach a new generation of riders how to master the game for themselves.
Allie’s openness about overcoming ringside anxiety at a critical stage in her riding career is welcome relief for young riders who are quietly grappling with the technical and emotionally demanding world of horse sport.
For the past three years, before each show season, Schmidt hosts a day-long event for her students focused on long-term planning and rider psychology.
Along with a sports psychologist who is familiar with the unique pressures of horse sport, Allie chairs a breakout goal setting session where she gives each rider an opportunity to focus on the season ahead.
“Especially as a teenager, you're going through so many changes, and you're so stressed anyway. I think it's really important that kids realize it's normal, and there are tools to help you.”
— Allie SchmidtMad Barn High Performance Athlete
She encourages her students to break down vague or psychologically daunting ambitions − like, “win more firsts” − into pragmatic “micro goals” that are within each rider’s ability and control.
“You can’t control whether you come in first,” she explains. Instead, she gives her students a more empowering framework: the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) rubric that has been widely adopted in business, school and sport. Using this tool, the group works together to define goals centered on incremental improvement and skill development.
“Non-ribbon-based goals allow you to make progress and feel success, and those steps, in turn, will yield better scores. Don’t just make the ribbon itself the goal,” she advises.
Establishing and following through with rider-specific goals is a lot of work, but the framework is one Schmidt believes in. By fostering a growth mindset and celebrating small victories, Allie empowers her students to maintain a positive outlook and stay motivated, even in the face of setbacks.
Building Winners: Forage-First Nutrition & Equine Welfare
Allie’s focus on personal and athletic development extends to her equine athletes as well. She takes a holistic approach to her horses’ performance, working closely with experts like the qualified equine nutritionists at Mad Barn to optimize their diets for the demands of high performance.
In 2024, Allie Schmidt began working with Mad Barn nutritionists who formulated a detailed feeding plan for each of her performance horses.
Allie was impressed by the level of detail that goes into creating an optimized performance diet. “They weigh out each scoop of each grain and, from that, come up with a full analysis,” she explains.
“I received detailed notes on each horse and they suggested small adjustments I might make to balance their diets in areas where it was lacking. I learned a lot and now use this framework to inform my feed choices for all my horses.”
Mad Barn has also been instrumental in helping Allie provide targeted support for her horses who need an extra boost. In particular, she is pleased with how her horses are responding to w-3 Oil and Spirulina, which she uses to provide cool calories and antioxidant support for her hardworking horses.
“With supplements, there can be so many things on the packaging - claims and whatnot - and it’s hard to know what is true and what is not. With Mad Barn, everything is so straightforward and logical.”
— Allie SchmidtMad Barn High Performance Athlete
In addition to her focus on nutrition, Allie values the importance of turnout and natural living for her horses.
She ensures that all her horses, including her competition mounts, have ample time to graze and socialize in small groups, as she has seen first hand how this contributes to their overall well-being and readiness for training and competition.
Breaking Down Barriers for Canadian Equestrians
As Allie looks to the future, her primary focus is on the long-term athletic development of her horses and riders. “I get really excited when my students do well!” she laughs.
Schmidt’s reputation as a coach has allowed her to focus on performance. “I am a lot more selective than when I first started. I want students whose goals align with where I’m taking my program – into the high-performance realm. They don’t have to be competitive, but they need to be serious and want to get better.”
As a dressage rider and trainer based in Canada, Allie has faced unique challenges compared to her counterparts who spend their winters in warmer climates of Florida or California. “It’s hard when you don’t have a big financial background,” Allie acknowledges, sharing her first-hand awareness of the way a lack of resources can limit a rider’s development.
She appreciates that organizations like Equestrian Canada offer support and host fundraisers for the national teams, but as she puts it, “Making it to the team on your own is not easy.”
Horses at Winterwood FarmsDespite these challenges, Allie has found ways to maintain a high level of training and competition for herself and her students.
For example, she relies on a network of fellow professionals, including Canadian Olympic dressage riders Megan Lane and Belinda Trussell, who work regularly with Schmidt and her horses.
Schmidt is also a pioneer of virtual coaching technologies, allowing her to work with top-level international trainers, even when they are based overseas.
Finally, Allie makes the best possible use of the seasonal competition schedule, focusing on the robust summer circuit in Ontario and selectively travelling to major shows like Devon PA and Bromont QC when timing and resources align.
With her sights set on campaigning for the 2027 Pan Am and the 2028 Olympic teams, Allie is poised to make her mark on the international stage. Allie’s ability to overcome adversity and rise to the top sets an example for every young equestrian who wonders if they have what it takes. By staying true to herself, she is leading the way for Canadian Equestrians, showing the world what work ethic, ambition, and a personal connection with your horse can do.
