Breathing New Life into Youth Halter
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By Lindsay Whelchel
The current state of affairs was obvious to Judy Ford and a group of her horse show friends. They were at a horse show in 2013 when they realized that of the 10 APHA Youth Halter classes at the World Championship Show, there were only 30 participants. Their beloved discipline was fading away, desperately losing interest from the next generation. They had to do something.
“We decided to give $10,000 in scholarships,” Ford says. “There was $3,000 of it sitting right there [among Ford and her two friends]. Let’s get 10 people to put in $1,000 dollars a piece.” The initial plan was to give out a $1,000 scholarship to the World Champion horse in each Youth Halter class at the AjPHA World Show. “We did that in about 10 minutes. Then, since we did that so well, we wanted to see if we could get another $5,000 and give the Reserve Champion horses $500 scholarships.”
In the months since, the idea, and in turn, Youth Halter classes, have seen exponential growth. The first year the group, dubbed Friends of the Halter Kids, offered this incentive was 2013, and 34 horses showed up to participate.
“Not a lot of people knew what we were doing,” Ford said. “Last year, it got to be [very popular] with this little group of people, so we ended up having $30,000. We doubled our money! We went from 30 horses participating to over 75 horses, and we paid down to 6th place in scholarship money. That worked fantastically because we shared some of the money with everybody. Very few kids didn’t get a scholarship of some sort.”
The spirit driving the incentive is a love of showing Halter horses. Ford and her husband, Tommy, have been raising and showing Halter horses for over 20 years. It’s an event that appeals to Ford for a wide range of reasons, from the beauty of the horses to the safety factor, since she’s a breast cancer survivor and doesn’t want the risk that comes with showing while horseback. “It’s something that kind of gets in your blood, and I’ve enjoyed showing halter horses,” she says.
Ford is definitely not alone in her feelings that the industry must work together to preserve the discipline for the next generation.
“Now, we’ve got around 60 people in our little group, and it’s worked out great,” she says. “We have a great bunch of people. It’s funny, because we’re all competitors, but when it comes to this, we all band right together. There are probably only five people in the group who have youth kids. The rest of us have no one showing in youth classes. That’s how much we believe in Halter.”
The excitement surrounding the group’s efforts was palpable in the stands at the 2014 AjPHA World Show. “My husband says the only people who like to watch Halter are the people who are doing it, because it’s kind of slow. Last year, there were people in the stands watching Halter, and it wasn’t just [the exhibitors’] parents. There were some of the big-name trainers watching the Youth Halter classes and they didn’t even have youth competing. When you start giving away that much money, people start paying attention.”
During the awards ceremony, youth exhibitors were presented with larger-than-life checks to represent their scholarship earnings, which only served to amplify the buzz.
“Somebody from the foundation escorted every kid from the show ring, because they had so much stuff to carry,” she says. “Before we left the show grounds, we had people coming up to us and saying that they wanted to be involved next year. Now, we have $45,000 for 2015. We’ve doubled our money again! Since it was such a success, APHA has decided they needed to do something similar for other classes. They wanted to get involved, so they allocated a certain amount of money. They gave us another $15,000 for Halter, so that puts us up to $60,000.”
In addition, the group has an offshoot of members organizing another $5,000 to give to rookies and kids who compete without trainers.
“This is a first in our industry,” she says. “Kids haven’t had this kind of opportunity to win this kind of money before, and it’s scholarship money. It’s not money they get today. We wait until they go to college, and the check is written out to the college or trade school the child would like to attend.”
For the group, the ultimate reward of giving a scholarship that will guarantee an educational future is a strong motivator.
“If you’ve ever had kids, and you’ve got to pay for their education, it’s very expensive,” she says. “There’s one little girl who’s about eight years old right now, and she’s already got $3,500 in her account. I’m sure she’s going to be out there showing again this year, and she’ll probably add a lot more before this summer is over with. If we can keep doing this every year, I think, by the time some of the younger kids take their money out, they might have at least a year of college paid for.”
Robin Robinett and her husband, Larry Morse, who, along with Bob Cassata, were original founders of the Friends of the Halter Kids group, echo this sentiment. “Education is very important in this day and age,” Robinett says. “The youth and amateurs are the backbone of any organization, so you have to somehow increase the participation.”
Ford agrees. “We’ve got to get the kids behind us, because they’re going to be the backbone of the industry moving forward. Otherwise, it’s all going to go away.” The group’s goal to keep kids involved in Halter competition isn’t solely to preserve the discipline. They believe that showing horses, in general, is beneficial for the youth of today.
“It keeps their minds occupied. The respect for their trainers and the camaraderie these trainers show the children is very important. It keeps them off the streets and out of doing drugs and drinking; it keeps them busy,” Ford says.
Another, less obvious, result of the group’s efforts has been a benefit to breeders of Halter horses by ensuring future interest in the sport. Since the group’s inception, this program has been a labor of love for Fred Cole. “It’s been really positive because they know the youth are our future, and if we want to continue, we’re going to have to introduce more people to the sport,” he says. As much as it’s been a benefit for the kids and Halter in general, Cole says it’s been heartwarming for the donors to witness as well.
“The joy of seeing the kids’ faces when I present the checks to them, knowing that money is going to go to college, and knowing that I helped them get there… you can’t imagine what that feels like. It’s the thrill of knowing you helped those kids. You’re helping put them through college, and yet you’re a total stranger.”
However, it’s clear that when it comes to these donors, they’re certainly not strangers; they are the Friends of the Halter Kids.
