What Matters? Rolling With It Matters.
Monday, June 1, 2020
Back in the 80s, Steve Winwood recorded the song Roll With It. It’s an apt metaphor for where we are.
As horse shows start to open up, it’s going to be all new. These won’t be like horse shows of last year. But they are horse shows. And they’re springing to life—in Texas, in North Carolina, in Virginia, in Tennessee, even in California where the ASHA and USEF worked with the Silicon Valley Horse Show (incidentally the first recipient of the ASHA Horse Show Grant program) to get the show going in early June.
There will be new procedures. There will be new rules. There will be new requirements. We won’t like them all. These are meant to keep all of us safe. And we’re going to have to roll with them. Many of the show boards and personnel are made up of volunteers who are donating their time, money, and energy to make a horse show happen. And they’re doing it in incredibly difficult times. So, please be patient and be helpful.
There’s been much conjecture around what shows will be like. The very likely answer is they’re going to change as time goes on over the course of this year. The pandemic situation is evolving. The regulatory environment at the local, state, and federal level is changing almost daily. Some states are opening up; some are locked down more tightly. For anyone to say what will happen that will impact our shows in three or six months is just guessing. If anyone were to have guessed just three months ago what this year’s show season would have looked like, no one would have predicted anything like this.
No one knows. We will learn along the way, together. We will make mistakes and we will get frustrated and we will ask why but we will learn and we will improve.
In our sport, the human athletes have to completely put their equine partners—in our case, the magnificent American Saddlebred horse—before their own needs. None of us would think about putting a lame or injured horse in the ring. We always say the safety and well-being of the horse comes first. We need to look outside ourselves as we go back to shows and put the safety and health and consideration of our fellow enthusiasts—exhibitors, owners, trainers, grooms, support personnel, show officials, volunteers—before our own. We can do it. We can roll with it.
What Matters? Rollin’ Toward the Future Matters.
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