BSJA Area 35 Summer Show

On Saturday Amelia took Destiny to the David Broome Event Centre in Chepstow to  jump at the BSJA Area 35 Summer Show. The week before Amelia won the Discovery at the same venue with 50 competitors in the class as we were jumping the Newcomers this week which was the third class we thought it wouldn’t start before lunchtime if we were lucky. Arriving at the show at around 11am we discovered that the Newcomers was nearly finished. I think they were so short of  competitors they were quite happy to wait so after rushing to tack her up and a quick warm up Amelia was in the ring having had no time to walk the course. Which was just as well as it was 1metre 10 in the first round with some fairly wide spreads. Destiny has not jumped Newcomers before and our intention was to go for a double clear if possible but not to win. Difficult though as only one other person left all the fences up. Destiny jumped clear in the first round and the jump off although Amelia took it nice and steady she still came 2nd. The rest of the classes that day were pretty poor entries wise and so were the pony classes on the Sunday. Several months ago I wrote a blog complaining about the lack of BSJA events in Wales so I thought we should support the Area 35 show, its a shame other people didn’t think the same, having said that I can also understand why they didn’t. Several comments I heard on the day were   ‘Most of the committee haven’t bothered turning up’    ‘There is no incentive for people to come’    ‘The rosettes are a disgrace’     ‘There was no advertising’    I can’t say whether these comments are correct but I didn’t see any of the committee that I know and the rosettes were about the cheapest you could get. What I did find shocking was the T Shirts given out to the kids on Sunday for the Junior BSJA. They had Junior Academy under 11’s 2008 printed on them. Most of the kids that received them were over 11 and were quick to point out that its actually 2009.  Some people complained about the venue saying that the BSJA had been shoved in a field out of the way but I think the venue is great there are lots of facilities there and the field wasn’t that far away it just needed promoting more.  On the plus side the people that were there running it were lovely and very helpful. But come on Area 35 lets up the game if we are to encourage more people into BSJA in Wales which I heard was the plan it could have been done a lot better than that and if people are going to join a committee at least commit yourself to your only summer show and not leave it to the few that worked very hard for probably very little thanks.

Posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 2:09 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.