HORSE SENSE : Jockey school near Castaic teaches equestrian skills--from mucking out stables to thoroughbred racing.

Mounted on Alfie, Brian Smoliak can beat any horse in the barn.

It helps that the races course through his mind, imaginary showdowns between the 18-year-old rookie and veteran jockeys many years his senior. Eyes alert, legs bent, whip hand flying, he races hard, barely remembering that he is crouched over a saddle mounted atop three 120-pound bales of alfalfa.

Alfie, as the jerry-built practice pony is affectionately called, is no Secretariat. But it’s one of the ways you learn at the World Jockey Assn., one of the few jockey schools in the United States.

Smoliak and other young men and women come here, eight miles north of Castaic, hoping to become jockeys, exercise riders or perhaps trainers. Their nine months of schooling includes daily sessions on Alfie, balancing over the bales, trying to harden their muscles and hone their form.

Smoliak livens up Alfie sessions by tucking headphones under his blue riding helmet to follow tape-recorded races.

Transported mentally from barn to track, he’ll whip Alfie as if he were charging home on Seattle Slew.

“I’ve broken two or three sticks on this damn thing,” Smoliak admits.

Jockeys the world over have trained on an Alfie, though he may go by other names elsewhere. The stationary saddle is a time-honored part of learning the sport.

Less common, however, is the World Jockey Assn. itself, a private school in a rough-and-tumble world where most skills are learned on the job through trial and error, often error.

Traditionally, farms produced most jockeys and exercise riders, those who put the horses through workouts but don’t actually race. Often, eager youngsters who knew how to ride, but not how to race, would ask a trainer to give them a chance.

“That’s how most of us learned back then,” recalls fortysomething Kristyn Goddard, a trainer, former exercise rider and founder of the school. “The way I learned was very dangerous.”

That’s putting it mildly. In 1977, when she was still green, a horse she was exercising at Hollywood Park suddenly bolted--”he just spooked at something”--and flung her into the rail.

“She got her leg broken in three places,” recalls her mother, Liz Jenkins.

“Four places,” Goddard corrects her.

As she lay in her hospital bed, Goddard decided there had to be a better way for women to learn. She had ridden since she was a girl but didn’t know how to handle a powerful thoroughbred. She resolved to start a school someday for women jockeys.

With the help of her mother, whose kitchen doubled as an office, she launched the Women’s Jockey Assn. in 1984, using rented saddles and rented horses at an equestrian center in the City of Industry.

As word of the school spread, men asked to enroll too. Goddard changed the name to World Jockey Assn. to preserve the initials and moved to Paradise Ranch, which she leases a mile or so east of the Golden State Freeway and Templin Highway.

Complete with 80 stalls and a half-mile track, the ranch is surrounded by green hills dotted with yucca plants. About 30 horses are kept there, some in training to race, others retirees used to teach the students.

Students pay $3,600 for a nine-month course and $275 monthly rent to stay in the “bunkhouse,” really a sparsely furnished mobile home, next to a nicer one where Goddard and her husband, Bill Davis, live. Some students stay all nine months, others only a few.

So far, 200 students have taken the course, with about 20% of them skilled or small enough to become jockeys; most work as exercise riders, who need the same skills as a jockey but are too big to race.

Goddard and Davis, a trainer, teach students to gallop, but also the finer points of mucking out a stall. Students work six days a week and study at night, preparing for written tests.

Davis even teaches basic track medicine, and students learn to apply the mixtures, filling bottles and tubes with names like “Liquified Horse Dressing,” “Teat and Udder Unguent” and “Dr. C. E. Kincade’s Anodyne No. 1 The Real Horse Liniment.”

“You learn everything at the school,” says John Atherton, 20, a professional jockey and school alumnus.

Atherton was a typical male student. He had ridden a few pleasure horses but really didn’t know how to ride. Although the women often rode as girls, the last time most of the male students sat on a horse was when their mothers took them to the Griffith Park pony rides.

Atherton had been an accomplished 98-pound wrestler at Ventura High School and graduated in 1990, thinking he might use his size--4 feet, 11 inches--to work as an undercover narcotics officer at high schools.

But one day, as Atherton worked the candy counter of a Sears in Oxnard two years ago, Red Tucker, a thoroughbred owner, walked up to buy some popcorn. “Boy, I know a good job for you,” said Tucker, whose horses have trained at Paradise Ranch. He handed Atherton a business card from the World Jockey Assn.

A telephone call led Atherton to the Paradise Ranch--and to Alfie. “I rode Alfie a lot,” he says. “Matter of fact, I still practice on him. Alfie will be with me to the end.”

Many students were former high school wrestlers, strong, small and used to controlling their weight. They also are used to taking directions from a coach.

Surprisingly, Davis says, teaching a newcomer like Atherton is easier than breaking an experienced rider of old habits.

After eight months, Atherton worked as an exercise rider for Davis and Jack Van Berg, trainer of the great Alysheba. Four months ago, he made his debut as a jockey at Turf Paradise outside Phoenix, Ariz.

“I was sweating before I got on the track,” he recalls. “It was scary. I finished last.”

But on Easter Sunday, nine days later, he broke the finish line first. Not bad considering the legendary Eddie Arcaro rode 250 losers before landing in the winner’s circle. In his first month, Atherton won five races, took seven seconds and nine thirds.

“I did pretty well for a bug boy,” he says, using track slang for a rookie rider.

Atherton, who now races outside Seattle, sent Goddard and Davis a signed photograph after his first win. He wears red and green silks, mounted on a handsome horse in the winner’s circle.

“I love this place and you and Bill are like family,” he wrote. “I’ll always be there if you need me.”

Indeed, Goddard and Davis have created an expanded family as much as a school, say former students.

Atherton’s wife, Trudi, came to the school in 1985 a rebellious 15-year-old “with an attitude.” But Davis and Goddard--”for being a woman, she’s real strict”--taught her discipline.

“They straightened me out. If I didn’t go to class, I didn’t get to ride,” she says.

Trudi Atherton, 22, briefly worked as an exercise rider but gave up the sport after a bad spill at Santa Anita in 1988. She also can’t shake memories of an awful period in 1986, when three women riders were killed in just a few weeks. One was dragged into a wall, another crushed, another slammed into a pole.

“That’s what happens when you get people who don’t know anything,” Trudi Atherton says. “Too many people go to the track thinking they can learn.”

That’s what Cathy Stolins, 22, had thought. Now a World Jockey Assn. student, she had walked onto the track at Aqueduct in New York a few years ago and told a trainer: “Give me a chance. I know how to ride.”

She could handle the younger horses at first, but the trainer “started putting me on stronger horse and I started getting scared.”

Then, while Stolins mounted a 4-year-old ominously named Fateful Prospect, the horse spooked and threw her forward. She landed on her hip and looked up to see the horse run over her, his legs pumping.

“He just missed stepping on me,” she says.

The other riders wanted her to go to the hospital. “I wanted to get back on the horse.” She did, but just to prove she could still do it. But she turned her back on racing and only started riding again when she enrolled at the school a few months ago.

On a recent morning, Davis and Goddard watched as Stolins confidently rode by, along with Smoliak and student Karen Pollack.

“She’s coming along,” Goddard said.

“Oh, yeah!” Davis added approvingly.

Davis, a talkative Arkansas native, keeps a watchful eye on his students. As Stolins led a horse past him one morning, Davis looked after her critically, like a museum director watching an underling carry a rare vase. After Smoliak finished washing the hoofs of a 4-year-old gray called Smokey, Davis reviewed the job.

“He’s still got a big gob of dirt on him,” he said. Smoliak tried again.

A growth spurt ended Smoliak’s hopes of becoming a jockey 1 1/2 years ago, stretching him from 5-foot-4 to 5-foot-9. But he can still work as an exercise rider and hopes to become a trainer.

Smoliak had planned to stay at the school through the summer but got a surprise offer to work as an exercise rider from veteran trainer Shug McGaughey in New York. He decided to cut short his schooling and head east.

Is he ready?

Goddard, sounding maternal, tries to be encouraging but can’t hide a hint of worry in her voice as she answers. Smoliak will do well, she says, but “no one is ever ready for the track.”

John Giovanni, national manager of the Jockeys’ Guild, agrees. “You only learn to ride races by riding races,” he says.

Van Berg, who has hired many school graduates and praises it for providing training an earlier generation never knew, sums it up even better.

“The track,” he says, “is a hard place.”

Alfie leads a tough life, and he shows it. The bouncing of the students flattens the hay, leaving his back bowed--just like an old nag. At times like that, Goddard and Davis are left with little choice. They have to put him down.

The other day they did just that. They pulled off his saddle and fed Alfie to the horses.

Test Your Horse Sense

Here’s a sample of questions from written tests at the World Jockey Assn.

Q: What is “bearing in”?

A: When a horse moves toward the inside rail.

Q: Where are race horses tattooed?

A: Inside of the upper lip.

Q: What is a “good doer”?

A: A horse with a hearty appetite.

Q: What is a “washy” horse?

A: When a nervous horse gets sweaty before the race.

Q: Before bridling a horse, one should . . .

1. Tie a knot in the reins.

2. Loosen the head stall.

3. Untie the horse completely.

A: 2.

Q: What are the withers?

A: The space behind the horse’s neck, where the saddle sits.

Q: What color are the track’s quarter poles?

A: Red and white.

Q: What is an average workout time for three-eighths of a mile?

A: 36 to 37 seconds.

Q: What is an average race time for three-eighths of a mile?

A: 33 to 34 seconds.

Q: What is an average workout time for a half-mile?

A: 47 to 48 seconds.

Q: What is an average race time for a half-mile?

A: 44 to 45 seconds.

Where and When

What: The World Jockey Assn. open house.

Times: 10:30 a.m. Aug. 8 and 10:30 a.m. Sept. 12.

Directions: The World Jockey Assn. is located at 36200 North Paradise Ranch Road, about 8 miles north of Castaic. Take the Golden State Freeway north to Templin Highway, turn right then make a quick left on North Paradise Ranch Road. Follow the signs to the ranch.

Price: Free.

Call: (805) 257-4306.