Mama Told Me There'd be Days Like These

I'm thoroughly exhausted and have an uber-early start tomorrow, but wanted to give you a post-XC update...

All you have to do is look at the scoreboard to know that today was rough. Three horses withdrew before XC even started. Three more retired. Nine were eliminated. This leave 30 horses (from the original 54) to contest the championship tomorrow. There were only 3 double-clears, and most riders had at least one stop.

The good news is Kelly and Hollywood completed the course. Unfortunately, she lost her whip at the Sunken Road (11abcd), and had a run out at the b element of 13b. In addition to the 20 penalties for the run out, she was assessed an additional 21 penalties for breaking the frangible pin on one of the double corner. Reggie came into the box elevated, but pleased with himself. He-like many of the horses today-had a few scrapes and lumps after XC.

Alright, I need sleep...more tomorrow...

(Reggie getting post-run fluids)



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Rolex Cross Country Day - the early edition

Good morning! Beautiful day in the Rolex stable area! It is a clear, cool day...perfect for cross country!

The sunrise cast a purple tint to the sky this morning, which should be a good omen for Kelly, whose colors are purple and more purple. Hollywood almost seems to be grinning in his stall - he just KNOWS today is THE day! I took him for a stroll and a leisurely graze, taking the opportunity to review the course with him (he was more impressed by the grass.) We "discussed" all of the big questions and what his mom was planning. I specifically told him to not be worried or distracted by the ditch at the Coffin (7abc), since it will have water in it, and also the fact that the sunken road (11abcd) looks more like a quick water obstacle than a Sunken Road. The complex at 13abc should prove to be challenging (brush and rails with fadeaway landing to a skinny brush chevron and uphill to a skinny, turf covered house on an angle. Reggie will also need to keep his focus on his job (rather than the crowd) at the Head of the Lake (18ab, 19ab, and 20).
He will also need to be precise at the Normandy Bank (22abc) and the only remaining WEG question, the Double Brushes (26ab). Twenty-eight jumps with 46 efforts in 11:11...I have no doubt that Reggie will come back a little tired, but satisfied!

CUONXC!!!




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Cigar Ln,Lexington,United States

Rolex Dressage Day 2 Wrap Up!

Wow! So much for a "day off!" Friday was a busy and FUN day that started a little before 8 am and ended with me trekking back out to my car after 9 pm...if I don't mention it later, come to the Horse Park prepared to WALK. A LOT. Rolex has a ton of shuttles, but even my magical "all access pass" wristband can't make them appear when I really want/need one all the time. I am guessing I walked no fewer than 8 miles yesterday, 4 of which were on XC. Anyway...

What did I do besides walk all over? A recap!

--shopping! Visited USPC sponsors Dover Saddlery, Professionals Choice, Revitavet, Triple Crown and Perris...will try to hit a few more tomorrow!

--celebrity games! Totally hilarious to watch Kelly Sult (my boss for the weekend), Laine Ashker, Cathy Weischoff, and silver medalist Gina Miles play with the Prince Philip Cup riders. Also awesome to see those PPC riders looking beautifully turned out and representing USPC with style and class!!!

--jump school for Hollywood! I had the privilege of setting jumps for Kelly's afternoon ride. We joked with General John Burton that Kelly alternates between vaulting and using a trampoline to get on the 16.3 hand Hollywood (anyone who laughs at my jokes is pretty awesome in my book!) Kelly and Reggie put on quite a show for an audience of at least 25 spectators. He looks rarin' to go!

--Land Rover obstacle course! I forgot my license (and gnome!) back in the barns, so Michele (Kelly's sister) was our driver. It was INSANE! You had to navigate a steep hill, water turns, and...a teeter totter! I plan to go back and drive tomorrow...I wonder if they would let me do the course in Indy (teeny Ford Focus)? Well, I'll let you know how this bona fide city driver does!

--course walk! Laine Ashker led a USPC course walk and in true Laine style, managed to cajole a few of her fellow riders into discussing the obstacles. I went out quite a bit later, pool floaties and gnome in tow. Had a minor panic attack when we got to fence 12 and I realized that I. Did. Not. Have. My. Phone. CRAP! Ran back to "special edition" sunken road (#11) - I call it special edition because it's not supposed to have water in it, but even course designers can't fool with Mother Nature (she wanted a 3rd water jump, I guess!). Anyway. I panicked. My heart raced. I did not see my phone. Start feeling around the base of the road. Nothin'. I start using language unbecoming of a Pony Clubber. Still, my phone does not appear. Michele and Jen come back to keep me from a total freak out and help me scour the water covered road some more. I owe my life (okay, maybe a bit much) to Michele for fishing my Kate Spade-clad iPhone 4 from the mud. I even had a text from Deep South's HMO! Much rejoicing! Phone (on which I am now writing this blog in a fit of insomnia) seems to be a-ok. Phew! I had to take the rest of my pics with a regular digital camera, but yes, I have pics of Grady the Gnome at every fence!

--Highlight of my day: I'm prancing (if you know me, you know that yes, indeed, I DO prance!) around the Head of the Lake complex wearing a purple swim cap, children's size swim goggles and a zebra pool floatie, posing for pics with Grady in HIS Floatie and trying to vault on the ducks when current leader, Tiana Coudray says to Kelly, "She's funny."

Rock on!

P.S. 82 days 'til Festival!!!




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Celebrity Pony Club Opportunities Friday!!

Day off for Team Hollywood, so hitting the Trade Fair...

Cool stuff for PCers...

12:30 celebrity games at Walnut Arena! Gina Miles, Laine Ashker, Kelly Sult and Cathy Weischoff will be playing--don't miss it!

3:30 Cross Country Course Walk with Laine Ashker! Meet at the Start Box!!!

And stop by the Pony Club Bookstore booth in the covered arena and get a Pony Club tattoo! Just like Grady the Gnome!




Grady showing off his new tattoo with Mary at the Pony Club booth in the trade fair!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Berea Rd,Lexington,United States

Live! From the USPC National Office!

So this is really cool...I'm sitting in the Board Room of the USPC National Office, the walls are covered with the cool banners created for the World Equestrian Games, pictures of former USPC Presidents, walls of trophy cases containing the very fancy perpetual trophies, and a collection of commemorative posters from past Festivals eating pizza with the 4 teams who will be contesting the Prince Philip Cup for Juni or Games. Pretty cool! I made a point of showing a few of the kids my name on the Cavalry Trophy (located right next to my Pony Club BFF - Michele Sult's - nameplate and pointing to me on my Haflinger pony in the 1992 Festival Poster...It is still really cool to know that little old me has a presence in this room when USPC has so many famous alumni!
(Left: Grady the Gnome posing with the Prince Philip Cup!)





Team Hollywood had a busy, but satisfying, afternoon. At 2 pm, Kelly took Reggie out for a gallop before her 3:17 pm dressage ride. We knew we would have a very short time to get Reggie cleaned up and ready for his dressage test, but geeez...Kelly brought him back to the barns at 2:27 pm and wanted to be on and ready for dressage warm up at 2:40!!!! ACK! Somehow, we did it. Definitely good teamwork!

Reggie and Kelly had a wonderful, relaxed warm-up (not normal for this old fireball), and it carried over into the cavernous Rolex Arena for her test. Although the scores were not those to rival the leaders in the first phase, Kelly was definitely very happy to have her most relaxed test ever at Rolex. Back at the barns, we hosed Reggie off, took him and Kelly's other two horses out to stretch their legs and graze, and then did the evening ritual of icing and wrapping. The old guy looks content and quite pleased with himself!


Tomorrow, Team Hollywood will have a chance to enjoy the Trade Fair and vendors (I need to buy a new dressage coat! And we need leg grease for Saturday!) and watch some of the horses in the second half of the split. More importantly, Kelly and a couple other riders - Laine Ashker, Gina Miles, and Cathy Weischoff - will face off in the USPC Celebrity Games challenge! Rumor has it (and I have pretty good sources!) that the four games that will be played are:

• Mug Shuffle
  


• Two Flag



• Ball and Bucket



• Bending Race

Do be sure to stop by the WALNUT ARENA at 12:30 pm to cheer on the celebrities and watch our very talented Junior Games teams face off! I'll be there to make sure Kelly behaves herself! :)

If you see me walking around in my red wellies and carrying my garden gnome, do say hi!

Musings from the Rolex Stable Area...

Although it was quite chilly this morning, the good news is...it's NOT raining! In fact, the sun is quite warm (chilly in the shade with the wind, though!) and the Horse Park looks absolutely magnificent! There is a very strong USPC presence, with Pony Club members serving as dressage stewards (they are SO professional!) and the Prince Philip Cup teams moving in.

Kelly has ridden Reggie twice this morning--had a lesson with Silva Martin and then a quick dressage ride around noon. Kelly is going to take him out for a quick gallop at 2, followed by a quick cleanup of horse, rider and tack to go to final dressage warm up at 2:40. They are the last ride of the day at 3:17...

Visited a couple of vendors, and Grady, my Cleveland Indians garden gnome is getting around...

Good day so far!!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Lexington,United States

Am I in Kansas or Kentucky???

Well, the good news is that I made it to Lexington! The bad news is...IT'S RAINING!!! I cannot believe how much rain has fallen just since I arrived at 4 pm, and it looks as though Lexington has been getting this much rain every day for the past few weeks...holy schmoley - there are lots of unintentional "water features" all over the Horse Park!

There was an interesting twist to the First Horse Inspection this morning...ever try to hold a CCI**** jog when there are tornado warnings and sirens going off? Well, that's what Rolex organizers had to deal with this morning. All of the Rolex and reining horses were moved into the Alltech Arena to wait out the storms. The jog, originally scheduled for 10 am, was pushed back t0 11 am. A total of 45 horses will contest the 2011 title.

My trip was rather uneventful, although my poor little car was getting tossed around a bit in West Virginia from the high winds. Roadkill count for my 530 mile journey - 21: 1 deer, 2 avian, 1 disembodied deer leg, and 17 unidentifiable small mammals.

If you haven't been to the Horse Park since 2007 (like me), boy, are you in for a shock! Having grown up in Ohio, I spent a lot of time competing at horse trials at the Horse Park, so I used to be pretty confident that I knew the layout like the back of my hand. While the stabling area pretty much looks "same as it ever was," there are clearly some swanky new facilities as a result of last year's WEGs (see aforementioned Alltech Arena.) I can't wait for the sun to come out so that I can take pictures and show you where all of the Festival events will be taking place!!

Alright, well, tomorrow is the first day of dressage and Kelly and Reggie are the last ride of the day at 3:17 pm. Keep your fingers crossed that it won't rain!!!

Oh yeah...83 days until Festival 2011!!!

Preparing for the Great Rolex Adventure!

Tomorrow morning, I will hop into Indy, my trusty little red car, and head about 550 miles west to Lexington, KY. Why am I heading to Lexington on a Wednesday when I should be in the office, you ask? Hellllllooooooooooooooo....ROLEX! ROLEX! ROLEX!

Although it is exciting enough to attend Rolex as a spectator, I am headed to the Horse Park to do some hard core work! I will be grooming for #28, Kelly Sult riding Hollywood, checking up on the Prince Philip Cup competitors (okay, mainly eating any snacks that they might offer me while strolling through their tack room), meeting with some key peeps in the USPC National Office to review plans for the Championships portion of Festival, and...oh yeah, providing lots of cool information about the Kentucky Horse Park here in this blog! It promises to be a VERY busy weekend!

I can't tell you how excited I am to groom for Kelly! This will be her 4th time competing in the Rolex CCI**** on the awesome 19 year old Hollywood ("Reggie"). I know Kelly because her big sister, Michele, and I were pretty much inseparable back in our Pony Club days - we were pretty much like frick-and-frack, and even now, we get pretty silly when we get together! But we are quite the team when working on Reggie in the vet box...having Pony Clubbed together, we don't even have to talk about what to do--we just set everything up and go to work! (Well, Reggie and Kelly do the hard work out on the course, but Michele and I do the hard work back in the barn!)

If you're going to Rolex, do be sure to check out some of the very cool offerings sponsored by USPC! Four teams of Pony Club Games Competitors will compete in the Prince Philip Cup, and even get to help coach a special round of "Celebrity Games" played by Rolex competitors, past and present on Friday at 12:30 pm in the Walnut Arena - it's usually pretty hilarious so don't miss it! (Kelly played in last year's games, and had so much fun that she signed up to do it again!) USPC is also offering special course walks for members -- the Cross Country walk will be led by Rolex competitor Laine Ashker on Friday (Time TBD, and I'll try to post it here when I get the info!) and the Show Jumping walk will be on Sunday at 8:30 am (I will confirm that and post updates here) with FEI course designer Richard Jeffrey and Marc Donovan. Oh, and don't forget the most important part...SHOPPING!!! :D

Alright, well, I should probably sign off, as I'm leaving in about 8 hours and haven't even packed...GAH! If you see me wandering around the Kentucky Horse Park DO say hello!

Oh yeah...84 days until Festival 2011!!!

Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself...

Alright, so now that I have this blog set up (and I'm actually hearing rumors that I *might* actually be getting some followers--wowza!) I thought I should take some time to tell you a little bit about myself and my involvement with USPC.

My name is Yvette Seger, but most Pony Club members call me "Sock Lady." Even Pony Club parents call me "Sock Lady." I actually don't mind because "Sock Lady" is misspelled and mispronounced less often than my real name. I blame this on general confusion about whether the letter Y is a vowel or a consonant in the US, but that's more of a discussion for my Facebook page than The Daily Sheet. But I digress...

Anyway, who am I? Well, I'm a graduate H-A Pony Club member from Lake Shore Pony Club, a now defunct club in the Tri-State Region, that was based in Huron and Lorain counties of Ohio. If you need a landmark, the world famous amusement park, Cedar Point, was pretty much where we had all of our unmounted meetings in the summer. I mean, riding cross-country is like a 4-legged roller coaster, right? I learned to ride when I was 8 years old, and my love for horses was and continues to be quite a shock to my parents (and their checkbook!) They sent me to a week of Girl Scout camp, and then all of a sudden they have this child that is now running around the house, building jump courses out of chairs and coffee tables (all while wearing a helmet, natch!) They hoped it was a passing phase, but by the time I was 10, they'd given up all hope, sold our home in the Cleveland suburbs and purchased a home with 9 acres so that I could finally have a horse of my own. See, we Segers are all about the "full experience." If I was going to have a horse, my parents wanted me to do everything. Thus the solution was to move to the country, and build a stable in the backyard. My parents purchased Smokey, my saintly first horse, for my 11th birthday and he moved into our backyard that spring. I'd read every horse book that I could get my hands on (including the Pony Club Manual of the time - The British Horse Society's Manual of Horsemanship) but let's be honest...Two non-horsey parents and an 11 year old horse crazy kid? It's amazing that we didn't kill poor Smokey!

Me and Smokey, pre-Pony Club

Enter Pony Club. By chance, my mom and I met Dr. Jeni Hren-Gaffney at the local vet clinic (those barn cats need veterinary care, too!) and we mentioned that I had a horse. O...M...G...Jeni told us all about this magical organization called "Pony Club" that I *had* to join (and what better spokesperson than Jeni, a Graduate A and now the DC of Bath Pony Club?) I re-read my favorite book, A Very Young Rider, and realized that my idol Vivi had been in Pony Club. Vivi wore her Pony Club pin on the front of her helmet and it looked SO COOL. *I* wanted to be in Pony Club!!! Shortly after, I joined Cuyahoga Valley Pony Club (formerly Hudson PC, and currently called Columbia Hills PC) and received my D3 rating. I proudly put my Pony Club pin on the front of my helmet, just like Vivi.

Memories from my first Pony Club Rally, the Tri-State Regional Dressage Rally. Left: The Cuyahoga Valley Pony Club Team (Smokey and I are second from left). Right: Me and Smokey posing with our awesome Stable Manager, Lisa. Our team got second place, and I was the overall high score "D!"

Nearly 25 years later, I'm still proudly wearing my Pony Club pin (just not on my helmet!) On any given weekend, you can find me wearing it on some brightly colored polo shirt (to complement my socks) while judging Horse Management at a rally, or wearing the smaller Life Member version on my jacket while competing at events. In addition to my PC pin, I wear a few hats within the USPC organization. In 2007, I became a Chief Horse Management judge - a role in which I never saw myself, but all my PC friends now tell me that they just knew I would do someday (hey, I knew the rulebook and had a high return of points on inquiries!) In 2008, I became the Horse Management Organizer - or HMO - of the Capital Region (oh yeah, I moved to Washington, D.C. at some point between my D3 rating and now - come visit my House anytime!) and I am currently the Co-Chair of the National Horse Management Committee (you know, the group who is responsible for writing the rulebook and reading all of your rally evals! Yes! Yes! We DO read them!!!) I'll tell ya...I never imagined any of this when I was a kid...but I love it. And it may sound a bit cheesy, but I don't mind giving up a lot of my time because I know lots of people did it for me. And I have to say, I have a good time hanging out with all of you, too! :)

So there it is...my Pony Club "history." Wow. I feel old.

And just because I'm counting...

85 days until Festival 2011!!!

Got a question or topic you'd like me to cover in The Daily Sheet? Email Me!

Let the Countdown Begin!!!

April. Fourth month of the year that opens with a day of practical jokes and ends with the Rolex Kentucky CCI****. For many of us, it brings a lot of rain, and with the rain comes mud, and of course, muddy horses. And for much of the country (or at least the portions of the country that spent a good chunk of December, January, February, March and even early April covered in snow), it's when Pony Club really gets into the swing of things and everyone starts getting excited about mounted lessons, ratings, rallies, and qualifying for Championships.

If you haven't heard, 2011 is a particularly special year for Championships. I mean, it's not just Champs...it's FESTIVAL. And to top it all off, it's the 10th Festival USPC has hosted at the world famous Kentucky Horse Park! Like Napoleon Dynamite, it's kind of a big deal. And although July 18 - 26 may seem ridiculously far off when you're busy with school, preparing for ratings and rallies and banishing dandruff from your pony's mane and tail with the biggest bottles of Listerine you can find, lemme tell ya...

Festival is only 88 days away. Yikes, right?

As you can imagine, the BIGGEST rally and educational opportunity sponsored by USPC requires a lot of planning and preparation so that you can have a totally awesome experience once you get to Kentucky. Since this will by my *gulp* 5th Festival and I will be serving in the role as the Overall Horse Management Coordinator (more on that job in a later post), I asked Wayne Quarles (Overall Championships Organizer) and Nancy Pittman (Vice President for Activities) about the possibility of writing this blog that will not only chronicle the preparation involved for the Horse Management portions of Festival, but also offer some tips and provide a forum for answering any burning questions you might have regarding HM expectations.

Although I'm now too old to be an active Pony Club member and participate in the mounted portions of Festival (BOOOOO!!!) I'm all too happy to share my trials and tribulations of being a Chief Horse Management Judge (whoa, how did THAT happen?) who spends most of her non-rally weekends competing a borrowed horse (grey - my curse!) and pony (paint with dandruff "issues" - my other curse!) at horse trials.

Well, I'll be honest...we have a lot to cover over the next 88 days, so fasten your properly fitting ASTM/SEI helmets, lace up you paddock shoes, and slap on those medical armbands, 'cause it's gonna be a wild ride!

Got a burning HM question you'd like to see featured in the blog? Email Me!