Having grown up riding hunter-jumper and dressage horses, I never thought I would ever really be involved in the world of Quarter Horse showing. That was, until I joined the UF Horse Judging Team in 2017. I joined because I was trying to make the most of the opportunities offered in the department, and I’ve always loved learning about horses. What I didn’t realize was how much I would truly gain from the experience.
Horse judging at the collegiate level involves learning a variety of different disciplines and understanding how competition judges score and place their classes. Though there are several ways to compete in horse judging, the American Quarter Horse Association is by far the largest organization to host collegiate judging contests, so naturally, you learn how to judge Quarter Horses. Going into it I thought my years of equine experience were going to be enough to be successful, but I found that when it came down to it I had to re-learn everything I thought I knew. The Western discipline classes were actually easier to learn since I had no prior background that influenced what I saw in the arena. The English classes with witch I felt more familiar were still vastly different than what I had been exposed to growing up and required me to rethink much of what I had learned in order to be a successful Quarter Horse judge. The Quarter Horse world is truly its own culture.
In a competition there are two phases, first the judging phase and then the reasons phase. In the judging portion everyone watches several classes of four horses each and without collaborating, ranks each horse in the class from first to fourth. After judging, specific classes are selected to be “reasons classes”, which then means you have to justify your reasoning for ranking the class to an experienced judge. Reasons are delivered in the form of an oral recitation of your logic working from top to bottom through the class placings. These must not only be accurate, but also delivered compellingly. The reasons score is determined by your accuracy is describing the horses in the class and in the quality of delivery. The catch was, you only had about 15 minutes to prepare. This was an interesting set up, because it allowed you to gain points back even if you had placed a class incorrectly according to the official judges’ panel as long as you had a convincing argument for why you placed the class in the rank you did.
While being part of the judging team did teach me a lot about a breed and disciplines that I had never understood before, the competition experience was what truly made an impact. Over the course of the year we traveled once to Ohio and twice to Oklahoma to compete against other colleges. We practiced endlessly to memorize rules and penalties in each discipline and practiced several sets of oral reasons each week after watching videos of classes in order to prepare. Yet no amount of practice prepared us for the anxiety of going into our first real reasons set in front of a judge at our spring contest. That first set I can clearly remember. I was trying my best to recall what the horses looked like and what had happened, but unlike in practice when we delivered reasons after each class, I had just watched three hours of classes, and the horses had started to blend together in my head. I smiled at the stony-faced judge and started through my hastily rehearsed set, stumbling at first but becoming more confident as I realized that as I talked through it, the horse had been struggling to remember did come to mind. By the time the team made it to the Quarter Horse World show in the fall of that year, reasons were the easy part. I surprised myself at being able to write and deliver several minutes of detailed reasons from memory, a feat I had believed impossible when we first started the spring before.
Our judging team was good in competition but never great. Yet by the end of the seasons each of us was proud of the progress we had made. I believe that the horse judging experience more than anything, helped absolve me of my pubic speaking anxiety. When you struggle through something as stressful as judging with a team of people you also walk away with lasting friendships. The women on my judging team have become some of my closest friends, and though we are all interested in different aspects of the equine industry, we will always have those shared experiences to unite us.
Personally, I am not interested in pursuing judging to make a career out of it but the experience learning about different disciplines did help me become a more well-rounded horsewoman. Through the judging team I developed an appreciation for Western disciplines which I had never had a real interest in prior. I had never before been exposed to the excitement or quality of Western riding that I witness at the Quarter Horse shows. At the time I was already the Co-Captain of the UF Dressage Team, but after judging I elected to join the Western Team as well as a way to further explore this whole half of the equine industry that I had ignorantly dismissed before.
Horse judging changed not only my perception of Quarter Horses and Western riding but also built unforgettable friendships and made me a more confident and well-spoken horsewoman. I believe the experience is truly valuable and I recommend participating on a judging team to anyone interested in an equine career, as it can only strengthen your understanding of the industry we love so much.
Zoe Bowden 