Schooling shows...

Kat and I hit the schooling show over the weekend. Although I like having other entries in our classes, for this being his first time in the show ring doing a pleasure class, the first time being in a warm up arena with horses being longed, ridden and otherwise moving around, it was a big day for him and I took the two 'exhibition' classes as a good thing.

There is a lot to be said about schooling shows. Some things good, some things bad, but in the end, you are there to practice.  Only by practicing do you improve.  Of course there are also well run shows or the poorly organized.  Helpful judges that offer tips and ideas or those who say nothing and expect you to guess. There are also shows that fall in between in every aspect and in the end, they really are all, "...like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you're going to get."

I have been going through the ADS, American Driving Society rulebook and reading up on things as they pertain to the classes and shows I plan to attend. Under the ADS rules, General Regulations, Chapter 8, Article 14 Section 3. Junior, maiden, novice and limit drivers are prohibited from driving stallions.   Pretty much spells it out, plain and simple.   We will come back to this later for more discussion, but for now, with this in mind, the schooling show we were attending is run under USEF rules.  Which admittedly, I haven't exactly been reading up on...

When we arrived on the show grounds, they hadn't yet gotten started, which was good for us, since we got a little bit of a late start.  Some shows are notorious for late starts and this is one of them.  However, there are always skipped classes due to no entries and show staff may decide to combine classes to help speed things along.  This is a good reason to try and be a little early if not on time. Knowing the last few times I have shown Kat in hand, we were the only stallion in our class, I figured these classes would be skipped and they were.

I parked the truck and headed over to get us entered.  As I filled out the forms I let the women working the desk know I had a couple of questions. One of them being the ruling on stallions being allowed in their novice class.  ADS doesn't allow it, but you run under USEF rules- what do they say about it?  The one woman looked at me like I spoke a foreign language or had a tree growing out of the top of my head... 

She wondered if my pony was 'wild', 'unmanagable', difficult to control because he is a stallion, etc. and if so, why did I bring him?   All righty then...  I entered him in the novice class to 'school' and figured that would rule out any issues.  That would later change and I will explain why.  As I handed her the papers to process my entry, she looked at his name and said "Oh, I have heard of him before." That's because we have shown here before in hand...

My other question was more of a safety issue. Not so much for me, but more for others. The halter and sport horse in hand classes were followed by a short break. Then there were the two driving classes, lead line, two walk trot western classes and another short break.  I asked them if something could be done so we would not be exiting the arena headed right into their class of lead line entries waiting to enter.  Since not all horses are used to ponies or minis pulling carts, I did not want to set off any of the horses resulting in lead line kids getting dumped on the hard ground.  They agreed and said they would figure something out.

I had my number and headed off to unload my pony and get him warmed up. Halter classes were starting and hopefully I had enough time.