Deanna Searles Wins First AQHA World Title in Senior Trail With Suddenly A Good Bar

By: Brittany Bevis

You’ve just won an AQHA World Championship title. What are you going to do next?

“I bought a bottle of wine, Opus 1, and I said when I win the World I get to open that bottle. So now, I get to go home at Thanksgiving, and I get to open that bottle! It’s too expensive just to open, so you need a special occasion, and I think this is it!”- Deanna Searles

It is certainly a momentous occasion considering Deanna’s win this morning in Senior Trail aboard Suddenly A Good Bar is her first time winning an AQHA World Championship title. “It’s been a long time coming,” she says. “It just gets me all teared up. I’m very excited. I’ve been coming to the World Show for longer than I can remember. I showed as a youth when the show was still in Tulsa, probably 79′ to 84′. And, I’ve been coming ever since.”

Deanna was the first to recognize the quality of horses in a very competitive Senior Trail class this morning as well as the extreme difficulty of the pattern that was concocted by Tim “The Trail Man” Kimura. “The quality of horses in this class, at any given moment, is unbelievable. It’s just so amazing. We were driving here this morning, and the moon was huge and full. I said maybe the stars have aligned today. That’s what it takes in Trail, because, at any given moment, any horse and any rider can win. That’s what makes it so fun.”

From the repeated lope pinwheel to the complicated back-turn-back and side pass maneuvers, this pattern pulled out all the stops to test the very best Trail horses in the country. For Deanna, the hardest part was remembering the sequence of obstacles. “The challenging part for me was trying to remember to go back through an obstacle that we already rode through once. In practice this morning, I forgot part of it. Also, everything was so high, but all of these horses were so careful. It amazes me to watch all of them.”

This is a relatively new mount for Circle S Ranch, because the 12-year-old gelding she calls “Roany” was purchased by Jerry and Kathy Tobin this year following the Silver Dollar Circuit in Las Vegas. Deanna’s had her eye on this particular horse for quite some time, and when he became available, she knew he would be the perfect horse for Kathy. The assessment turned out to be correct because Kathy piloted Roany to win Trail at the Select World Show earlier this year.

Something that made this win even sweeter is that fact that Deanna’s husband, Jim, was by her side as she was named the World Champion. Jim placed third aboard I Gotta Good Name, who belongs to Kathy’s sister, Susie Johns. “Being out there together and both of us getting trophies was pretty exciting!”

Results:

1- Suddenly A Good Bar/Deanna Searles

2- So Dang Lazy/Jason Gilliam

3- I Gotta Good Name/Jim Searles

4- Chrome On My Zipper/Rusty Green

5- Some Hot Potential/Jennifer Paul

6- Hot Rockin Potential/Whitney Lagace

7- Snap Krackle Pop/Blake Weis

8- Eyed Be In A Jam/Bruce Vickery

9- Heza Radical Zip/Jason Martin

10- Suddenly I’m Sultry Hot/Whitney Lagace