Welcome to the fourth installment of a different kind of blog from WDAA! The purpose of this post is to allow the reader "into the heads" of both a trainer/judge/competitor, Karen Abbattista and her student, Deborah Herbert, a Florida WDAA member. We would like to share with you some moments in Deb's journey as she pursues her riding goals with her AQHA mare "GenuineArcticSpring", barn name "Belle". Please enjoy as you follow along with these posts that we consider interesting or...

Welcome to the third installment of a different kind of blog from WDAA! The purpose of this post is to allow the reader "into the heads" of both a trainer/judge/competitor, Karen Abbattista and her student, Deborah Herbert, a Florida WDAA member. We would like to share with you some moments in Deb's journey as she pursues her riding goals with her AQHA mare "GenuineArcticSpring", barn name "Belle". Please enjoy as you follow along with these posts that we consider interesting or challenging...

Western horses jog. English horses trot. Dressage horses trot. Everyone knows that. What does that mean for the western dressage horse? The western jog was a gait that could be ridden for long distances over the range or on the trail that horses could sustain without exhaustion and which could be sat comfortably. The trot is a gait that covers more ground at a reasonable tempo. To deal with the dynamics of the gait and to unload the horses back, some riders learned to post. Western riders bred...

Reserve Dressage Seat Equitation Rider-Clare Burke, Essay Contest-Cassie Crotty, High Point Hunt Seat Rider-Brianne Link, High Point Dressage Seat Equitation Rider-Ashley Guidry, Reserve Hunt Seat Equitation Rider-Jessica Hall, Community Service-Alexandra Adams. (ManciniPhotos) Wellington, FL – The College Preparatory Invitational (CPI) hosted its third year of competition this weekend at The Stadium at Palm Beach International Equestrian Center (PBIEC) in Wellington, FL, home to the...

Steffen Peters, 2011 Equestrian of the Year, at the Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico. Cincinnati, OH - To cap off a record-setting year, dressage superstar Steffen Peters added one more record to his résumé on Saturday night at the United States Equestrian Federation’s Pegasus Awards dinner. He became the first person to score the USEF’s Equestrian of the Year title three times. Peters (San Diego, CA) won the top honor in 2008 and 2009 based largely on his...

Cincinnati, OH - The 2012 International Hoof-Care Summit theme, “Zeroing In On Soundness,” reflects the needs of hoof-care professionals eager to learn the latest cutting-edge ideas to boost their profitability, efficiency and footcare skills. This is the 9th annual Summit, offering unequalled footcare education through 8 general sessions, 12 Hoof-Care Classrooms, 24 Hoof-Care Roundtables, 18 How-To Clinics and 3 Trade Show sessions. The Trade Show offers 9 uninterrupted hours of...

Lexington, KY - Skylar Rowan's high school in Knoxville, TN, offers a plethora of sports teams - even bowling and sailing. More than 20. But, there is one missing - the most important one to Rowan: An equestrian team. "Just like the majority of schools in my area, my school doesn't have the facilities or the budget to support an equestrian team," the 16-year-old says. But what is more frustrating to this high school sophomore is that most people outside the horse world, she says,...

Fairfield, CT — In poker it’s called re-shuffling the deck, and when the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association (IHSA) announced at the start of the 2010 semester that it had realigned its nine Zones to eight - changing the geography of its competitive regions and impacting coaching strategies - it promised to make the road to the 2011 IHSA National Championships, May 5-8, at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, an interesting one. With Regional and Zone Championships, and Western...

So here it is, my 13th time at the Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event. Who would have thought that when I went to my first Rolex in 1997 that I would end up only missing one between then and now (the 2009 event). My Rolex experiences started out as a day-trip jaunt from Western Kentucky University where I was attending school. It was my first year of college and an equine photographer that my friend, Laura, and I had met told us about the event. Since I was studying photojournalism at the time, I...

Silver medalist Lauren Sammis, Gold medalist Christopher Hickey and Bronze medalist Yvonne Losos de Muniz (Diana DeRosa) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—It was a double-medal day for Team USA at Deodoro Stadium as Maryland’s Christopher Hickey aboard Regent won the coveted Gold medal on a two-day averaged score of 70.725% after performing his freestyle before an appreciative crowd. New Jersey’s Lauren Sammis, who had led the scores at the end of the Team competition, finished in...