UDS Newsletter: October 2025
- sian9590
- Oct 1
- 12 min read
Member Shout Outs
Buckle up! Our members have been out there, kicking booty, in any number of venues. Here are a few:
Utahns Light Up Lamplight!
It may sometimes feel like Utah is a long way from the dressage capitals of the world, but that hasn’t stopped Utahns from competing on the highest levels, and this year’s US Festival of Champions was just one case in point.
Justin Giles rode his stunning chestnut Westphalian gelding Templeton’s Milano, in the USEF Five-Year-Old Test and the judges were clearly as impressed as any of us who have had the privilege to witness their partnership. Many of us were watching through the USEF network as the two won the reserve championship, and social media was alive with pride in this pair. We look forward to seeing what further heights they reach. Well done, Justin!
Lexi Fairbanks rode her thirteen-year-old, black Holsteiner mare Casara in the Dressage Seat Medal Final 14-18. Her dressage equitation placed a jaw-dropping fifth! Well done, Lexi! You did Utah proud!
Adrian Ward’s bay Oldenberger mare Quellenperle SL was ridden by Josh Albrecht in the USEF Four-Year-Old Test–and went on to finish in 3rd place in the CDS Four Year Old Futurity in September.
Former Utahn and UDS member Charell Garcia had an extremely successful outing representing Maplewood Warmbloods of New York. In the four-year old test, she won the championship on MW Verrazzano and took fourth place on MW Royalty. She also won the championship in the five-year-old test on MW Virtuous. In the six-year-old test, she took third on MW Mastermind and seventh on MW One More Dream, and she took sixth in the FEI seven-year-old test on MW Mercury.
Medal-Qualifying Rides at Millbrook
The final Millbrook Show of the season was filled with accomplishments:
Lori Barrett showed at the Grand Prix level and earned gold medal-qualifying scores on her chestnut gelding Lagerfeld K.
Sarah Simmons earned qualifying scores for her USDF silver medal
Amber Russell earned qualifying scores for her USDF silver medal after earning her bronze earlier this season–a rare double in one season!
Farrah Green and Breanne Amsler earned qualifying scores for their USDF Bronze Medals.
Well done, everyone!
UDS at USDF Region 5 Championships
Utah was well represented at the Region 5 Championships. I’ve listed the UDS competitors below as well as top two finishes, but this only scratches the surface of the good news. Full results are posted at Horse Show Office.
Rhyan Andersen (First Level Jr/YR Reserve Champion on Wradiant), Lori Barrett, Cassie Benson (Fourth Level Open Champion on Halegro, Fourth Level Freestyle Open & JrYR Champion on Halegro), Sydni Cook (Fourth Level Open Reserve Champion on Rosa Red), Leslie Dauray Edison, Siân Griffiths, Ammie Lords, Amelia Lords, Sara Kirby, Amelia McCandless(First Level Open and Jr/YR Freestyle Reserve Champion on Swiss Exploit), Samantha McKay, Amber Russel,
Upcoming UDS Election
The UDS wishes to extend a ginormous thank you to Debbie Baxter, Jasmine Beckstead, and Mindy Simmons for serving in interim positions on the board as we come up to our next round of elections. Keep an eye out for a ballot soon!
L Program Start This Month
The L Program is just around the corner, with Session A kicking things off on October 18 at Southern Belle Riding. If you haven’t reserved your spot yet, silent auditor tickets are still available here. Purchasing all three weekends is your best value, but you can also now purchase for each weekend individually as they arise.
Good news! For those of you who (like me), are daunted by the number of links to click and print before the start of the L Program, the UDS printing study books for all participants. We will have them for you at the first session.
We were able to award one participant and one auditor scholarship for the L Program. Carrie Matteson is unanimously selected for the L program participant scholarship due to years of service to UDS. Ashley Adams, another stalwart of the UDS, was awarded the auditor scholarship.
Thank you in advance to our generous hosts: Southern Belle Riding and Sage Creek Equestrian. Without your support, we could not make this program possible.
Plans for Next Year: Expanding Clinic Opportunities
The board has been eager to extend more options for clinics. In the short term, we are working on plans to bring Steffen Peters this February. This clinic will be limited to six participants, but a large number of auditors. We are currently working on nailing down the details, but we will post more on the community Facebook page as we know it.
The board is also working on a plan to provide grants to support more clinic opportunities, so keep an eye out for those details as well in the coming months.
End-of-Year Awards and Banquet
We are in the early stages of preparation for the End-of-Year Awards and Banquet. That means it’s time to start submitting those volunteer hours you’ve been accumulating! Our volunteer hour submission form is available here.
Not sure what counts? A list of possible kinds of volunteer opportunities is available on that same page, and I can always use more articles for this newsletter, so please feel free to pitch me at communications@utahdressagesociety.com
Member Article
Someone Had to Lose, and Today It Was Me
My Experience at a USDF Regional Championships—and Why I’m Glad I Went
Let’s be real: Driving over ten hours to ride a less-than-five-minute test is not the act of a rational person. For years, I had sat out the USDF Regional Championships, feeling like they were for other riders, better riders, riders on fancier horses. Yet knowing that my gelding and I were both getting older, I decided that this year, I would give it a shot. We earned our second level scores. Who knew when or if we would qualify again?
Even in normal times, I am a fairly driven rider, making time between work and family to ride five or six times a week. Regionals added new pressure, and I found myself pushing our training, riding for more impulsion, more cadence, more bend, more collection. I dropped my weekly cocktail, limited my sugar. I wanted to look like a rider who belonged in a championship class, even if I didn’t always feel like one.
The weeks leading up to the trip were stressful and sleep deprived. In my nightmares, I was called into the ring only to realize that I hadn’t braided my horse—nor saddled him—nor warmed him up. Thoughts of the drive also kept me up. I would be pulling two other horses besides my own over the Rockies in a longer trailer than I had ever pulled in the longest haul I had ever made. I found myself continually talking myself down: It would all be fine. It was just a test. It didn’t matter. No one was paying attention. No one cared about this at all.
No one, that is, except me.
I tried to keep my expectations low. In August, a barnmate’s mother looked up the standings on the USDF website, and I was surprised to learn I was sitting six out of the fifteen qualified Second Level Adult Amateurs in the region—better than I had expected. It had been a season of riding tests that were never quite what I thought we were capable of. We had a better ride in us, and I wanted badly to make that ride happen at Regionals.
My title here is a plot spoiler: You already know how this is going to go down.
Our warm up test was a train wreck. My horse Larry (“Larimer Square”) is nothing if not honest. He tries his guts out for me every time, but he also lets me know when it’s scary, which is often. My trainer put it best when she said, “I love his big feelings.” I do, too, though they don’t always help us score our best. While his bravery has grown enormously since jumping out of the arena in our first Training level test four years ago, confidence is still a work in progress, a fact that was on full display on our first day at the Colorado Horse Park.
From the moment I mounted, I could feel Larry quite literally shaking under the saddle. He did his best, but he was intensely aware of the atmosphere, the unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells, the five show rings going at once, the sheer number of horses. In every stride, I felt his tension, and he struggled to find the bravery to go within three feet of the rails. Only a lot of leg and a few judicious taps of the whip kept us from performing the whole test fully on the quarter lines, and we ended up earning the worst scores since stepping up to second level.
Tomorrow would be better, I told myself. On our first day there, we had schooled in the Championship arena, and over the course of that hour, he had decided that the sponsorship signs hanging fence-side were mostly non-carnivorous. Unlike the warm up test, there would be no heavy construction machines to catch Larry’s eye in the distance. Chances are, there wouldn’t even be suspicious stray women in red hats.
And our warm up for the Championship class was good. The tension was there, but Larry found moments to relax and stretch. The Grand Prix riders prepping their own tests were inspiring me with their brilliance. I was wearing my new coat. Larry was wearing his new saddle pad, a pre-regionals gift from my husband. We’d done the work. We were ready to give it our all. My nerves were fluttering, but they were not so different from any pre-test nerves. I could handle them.
My trainer called me over to take my headphones when she remembered, suddenly, that I could not carry a whip in a championship. The news unsettled me—I had thought that only the FEI classes forbade the use of whips. I had needed that whip to even approach the rails yesterday and I might need it again today. I was unprepared. I should have schooled differently.
And then I rallied. It wasn’t that bad. I was not reliant on the whip. We would be fine.
But then another voice piped up from the rail—a person unknown to me, saying “You also need a second number on your bridle. You only have one.”
My barnmate, eyes wide and locked on mine, asked where my second number was. “On his halter,” I said, “hanging by his stall.” A stall that was two full barn lengths away.
She turned in a dead sprint as I circled near the entry for the warm up. My ring was empty—we were the first ride of the class—and I had no idea how much time I had. The seconds ticked away with every beat of my racing heart, but in a minor miracle, my barnmate returned minutes later. (She might have a second career as an Olympic sprinter if the dressage thing doesn’t work out.) She fitted the second number to his bridle as the judge blew the whistle for us to enter. We had avoided disqualification, but gone was our chance to have a calming trot around the ring. We were now against the clock, posting (!) a very forward trot for X to salute before our time ran out.
Every doubting thought now screamed as the adrenaline of panic flooded my body. We really didn’t belong here. We’d just proven that. We didn’t know the rules. We were kidding ourselves to think we could compete.
I did my best to remember Ted Lasso’s advice on having a goldfish memory. The forgetting of one bobble or another had gotten me through so many tests, helping us qualify for regionals in the first place, despite the occasional mid-test buck or bolt. Still, the brace in Larry’s back was undeniable, the tension jolting me. My panic had become his.
I breathed deep, squeezed and released the reins, tried everything I could think of to let him know it was all ok, but every aid seemed muffled in cotton. His reactions delayed, our geometry was off. Our mediums and collected movements were indistinguishable. He threw in a flying change in our canter serpentine. He jigged in our simple change, a first for that particular mistake. I exited the ring devastated, not because of the embarrassment of my test, but because I had failed my partner when he needed me most.
The technical delegate called me over, and I apologized for almost forgetting her in my fluster. It hardly seemed to matter, I thought, after the ride we had just delivered. She congratulated me on having completed my test and I admitted I was lucky to have ridden at all. “I didn’t realize I needed two numbers,” I explained. “My barnmate had to run to get it, and I almost missed my ride.”
“Well, someone owes you a drink then,” she said, “because that’s not a rule. Two numbers are recommended but not required.”
“You’re kidding me,” I replied, but then added truthfully, “but that’s still on me for not reading the rulebook.”
That was the bald truth of it. I had not known what I did not know. I had gone to regionals under the presumption that the rules for competing there were the same as the rules for the rated shows that had gotten me qualified. That presumption was wrong.
I would love to tell you that I took it all in stride, shrugging our disastrous test off with a professionals’ easy “Today just wasn’t our day.” The truth was, I was exhausted and emotionally fragile. When the scores came in, they would be a full two points lower than our worst, but I didn’t need to see them to know how poorly we showed. I fought tears as I pulled Larry’s braids, brushed him, fed him handfuls of German Muffins, and told him what a good boy he was. I lost the fight to tears an hour later when I called my husband. “Maybe you can try again next year,” he said, wanting to soothe me, but I had no plans to make the trip again. Larry would be eighteen. It was too much to ask, too far to go. I had decided long before that this would be our shot, and I had blown it.
The irony is, I am usually the person in our barn who reads the rule book. My barnmates come to me with questions about show shirts and saddle pads, asking my opinions on whether they are show legal, and I recite my understanding and direct them to the page they need. My trainer apologized again and again for forgetting to tell me about the whip, but I wasn’t upset with her. She had spared me disqualification. In the days after, I talked to rider after rider who hadn’t known that rule until they arrived at their class. It’s not something anyone thinks about until they’re there.
When Katie, my fellow Utah Dressage Society board member, suggested I write about my experience for the newsletter, my stomach initially dropped. Did I really want to recount my ineptitude and failure for the whole community to read?
“The only rule I knew about was not being able to have a caller,” she wrote in her text. “I’m sure we aren’t the only two people who didn’t know about whips.”
I mulled her suggestion as I watched other riders pilot their horses through tests, both successfully and not. I learned of a fellow rider whose team accidentally wrote down the wrong test time, and who was still braiding when she was supposed to be in the arena, living out my actual nightmare. I learned about another who rode a beautiful test and came out beaming only to learn she was disqualified for—you guessed it—carrying her whip. And we were the fortunate ones. I was certain there were others out there who had qualified for Regionals but whose horse developed a last-minute abscess, or whose truck broke down, or whose boss refused them the time off. I was in good company in my misery, even if we each carried our disappointments silently and alone.
As I walked the grounds and watched more tests, I kept being aware of the keen sense of privilege I had to be there at the Championships. The afternoon of my own disqualification, I watched one of our local open riders in her Prix St. George championship class, her mare executing a series of nervous tempi changes during their initial canter down center line. The bobbles didn’t end there, but I wasn’t counting their mistakes. I was watching how the rider maintained her calm throughout, even smiling when the mare threw in her bonus maneuvers. The test wasn’t beautiful and it wouldn’t score high, but it was a master class in riding. The horse ended the class more confident than she had started it, and the trust her rider built shone as she halted for the final salute.
The next day as I sat again in the stands, a kind voice said “Scoot over,” and I made space on the bleachers for a new friend and seasoned professional. As we watched, she talked about the different views of the judges at C and E. She said that she’d heard riders complaining about the discrepancies in the scores of those judges, but explained that they are judging different things based on their different seats. Move by move, she detailed what each judge could and couldn’t see. Again, I sat there absorbing.
This is all to say that I came home from regionals having lost my class, but having gained real knowledge. Far from being sorry I went, I found myself filled with gratitude—for the trainer who prepared me, for the incredible horse that got me there, for my barn family, who didn’t shame or blame me for my feelings but who instead understood and gave me space to rally, and for my fellow dressage riders, from whom I have learned and continue to learn so much.
I went to Regionals, and I lost. I put myself out there, and showed a horse I adore, and it didn’t go to plan. I learned a lot—and ribbons are nice, my friends, but the learning is always the point. Besides, I still have the thing that, for the rest of my life, no one can take from me: I rode at Regionals. And if you have the chance—the opportunity—the privilege—maybe you should too.
—Siân Griffiths
