Kim B, an Eventing Nation reader, attended the East Coast Pony Club Championships last weekend at the Virginia Horse Center and was kind enough to tell us her story with words and photos, playing off of will.groom.for.food’s popular EN series ‘Are You Smarter Than A Pony Clubber?” Thanks for writing this Kim and thank you for reading.
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From Kim:
Are You Smarter Than THESE Pony Clubbers?
I just got back from the United States Pony Club Championships East, where I chaperoned (I prefer the term chef d’equipe–though the most complicated thing I did, besides driving the Quiz Bus, was make peanut butter sandwiches) the Old Dominion Region Junior D Quiz Team, consisting of (R-L) Emily, Katie (my daughter), Caitlin, and Kat. Katie and Kat are members of Holston Pony Club, and so are…
Sydney and Abigail, who, with teammates Emma and Alyssa, also competed in Junior D Quiz. Holston Pony Club has been around for 30 years, and I’ve had a child in it for 8, but we’re in a transition period now: a bunch of our upper-level members have gone off to college, darn them, and now we’ve got 8 active members, all D-level, all but 2 aged 12 or younger. So for us to have 4 kids qualify at the regional rally and go to championships was a pretty big deal. Kat had been before, but all the rest were first-timers.
Pony Club runs a National Championship in Lexington, KY, every 3 years. (This would have been a Nationals year, but it was postponed a year due to a little thing called the WEG.) The other years they run Championships East, Midwest, and West. East is the largest, because there are more pony club regions on the east coast (Metropolitan, for example, is pretty much just New York City and Long Island, whereas the Midwest Region comprises the entire states of North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri). We’re pretty lucky in Old Dominion Region, because Championships East is held in Lexington, VA, which is home for us–only a three-hour drive for my team. There were 645 competitors at this year’s event.
And my team watched it:
But you can’t compete in riding events until you’re 12 By Pony Club Age (Quiz Question: What is the day and month by which you must be a certain age to count as that age for pony club for the year?) and most of my team wasn’t. They were eligible for quiz, and they were excited about quiz:
There’s a point in every parent’s life, if they’re lucky, when they can feel their children begin to slip away from them, to find interests and passions that they pursue on their own impetus and for their own joy. I don’t mean that my daughter didn’t need me to drive the Quiz Bus, or that she didn’t want me making her a sandwich. But during championships I felt Katie coming into her own.
Even the members from our home club live widely separated from each other, and with conflicting summer schedules mostly had to study on their own. We had a Holston sleepover on Wednesday night, and it was my first clue that something was different. They screamed and giggled–but they also set up a dressage arena on the ping pong table, pored over horse posters and USPC rulebooks, and spread a library of horse books across the floor. In the morning they woke on their own and were dressed, packed, and sitting in the Quiz Bus 5 minutes ahead of our scheduled departure time. Without a word from me. It was a little unnerving.
Click the link below to read more about Kim’s squad…
More from Kim…
Thursday night we had the opening ceremony. I expected it to be a hokey time suck, but it wasn’t.
I admit to even feeling moved when a bunch of the Tetrathlon kids sang Happy Birthday to the 88-year old founder of tetrathlon in the US (whose name I absolutely can’t recall, but I will say, if tetrathlon makes you look that good at 88, we should all compete in tetrathlon).
My team worked well together. They’d pledged to always ask for the hardest questions possible (in some areas, competitors are allowed to ask above their own ratings level, for extra points). They looked confident and happy, they weren’t devastated when they missed a question, they were really exactly the sort of competitors we should all be. I only got to watch the classroom phase, so I didn’t have any idea how they were really doing, let alone how they were doing in comparison to the 22 other Junior D teams.
My team worked well together. They’d pledged to always ask for the hardest questions possible (in some areas, competitors are allowed to ask above their own ratings level, for extra points). They looked confident and happy, they weren’t devastated when they missed a question, they were really exactly the sort of competitors we should all be. I only got to watch the classroom phase, so I didn’t have any idea how they were really doing, let alone how they were doing in comparison to the 22 other Junior D teams.
After the first day of competition, they were first. After the second day, they were first by one point–758 points to 757, with another team at 752.
Sunday morning’s competition was two rounds of classroom questions, no conferring. During the first round my team missed every question.
They were hard buggers. Oh, my. I can’t repeat the actual questions (pony club reuses them, including at Midwests and Wests in the upcoming weeks), but let’s just say that completely memorizing the tetrathlon rulebook as well as all possible horse management penalties (don’t ask) would have been useful. They were not questions I knew the answer to, and I would have been nearly perfect through the earlier classroom rounds (not because I am necessarily smarter than a pony clubber–because I’ve judged classroom at our regional rally, several times).
My team took a deep breath in the break between rounds. They didn’t sulk or moan. They stood up for the last round, and answered every question right. (Those were some hard buggers, too. My daughter was asked the use of a farrier tool I’d never heard of before. She responded with calm confidence, even though she later told me she was making a wild guess. “Never sound uncertain, Mom,” she told me. “They believe you more if you sound like you’re sure.”)
Afterward they skipped off to watch show jumping while other sections of their division competed. We looked at the scoreboard and I did some math, and I told them that, no matter what, they couldn’t finish worse than 7th of the 23 teams. The top ten got ribbons. They were sorry for their final classroom performance, but they knew they’d done their best, and they knew they’d done pretty well. Everyone waited for the final postings.
But the final scores were whited out, darn them, so we had to wait for the awards ceremony.
Yeah, that’s pony club.
This is only half of the teams, I don’t have a wide enough lens. The Quiz Organizer (a peach of a guy!) announced that only 8 points separated the top 6 teams.
So–are you smarter than these pony clubbers?
Maybe. But probably not.
