Despite the tornadoes, power outages, and “off the wall” happenings during the APHA judge’s test last week in Fort Worth, Texas, 13 applicants tested with ten individuals passing the test.
Congratulations goes to Erica Lang of Pilot Point, Texas, who is one of the newly approved judges. Lang said that it was definitely an experience with no power and tornadoes already adding to the intense pressure of trying to do well on the rulebook, live and video testing.
“If we had to go to the rest rooms, we had to go in the dark,” Lang says. “They had to open the end doors to let light into the arena so we could try to see and judge. My eyes were really hurting by the end of the day. We definitely had some added extenuating circumstances that I’ve never seen to happen at the regular shows–but overall, I think I handled it very well.”
APHA Director of Judges, Candy Cain Jebavy, also described what happened during the testing process: The weather was crazy with an F1 tornado skipping over the host hotel in the middle of the night on Sunday. Then the live judging was held at a facility that luckily didn’t have any physical damage but no power due to the telephone poles being taken down by the tornado.The facility didn’t get power back until 9:30 p.m., long after our event was completed. Everyone had the “cowboy up” attitude and it really went pretty smoothly all things considered.The only change to the schedule was a delay in the start time due to the fact that the arena was too dark to see until the sun came up a little! Even more important, everyone bringing horses to the event to help us out was able to make it there on time, except one. We even had one gentleman come with his horses after losing the roof on his house the night before!
Congratulations to everyone who passed the test!
New 2011 Approved APHA Judges
John Boxell
Robert Dehn
Mike Jung
Robbin Jung
Gayle Lampinen
Erica Lang
Scott Merritt
Rhonda Replogle
Nancy A Wilde
Nancie Wright
You can find the most updated judge’s information on APHA’s website at
www.apha.com/judges, then click on Directory.
