“You shouldn’t be afraid to check,” said
trainer Nancy Renfro on Wednesday after the Horsemanship Preliminaries at the AQHA World Championship Show in Amarillo, Texas. Both Nancy and Select Amateur Christine Hocutt-Senteney are glad they heeded those words.
Sometimes
it is an interesting road to the winner’s circle. After Christine Hocutt-Senteney’s pattern in the Western Horsemanship preliminaries on Wednesday, she
thought she had a nice go. She was a bit surprised when she did not make it
back for the rail work aboard her homebred gelding, Bellieve Hes Blazing. Chris has always had an attitude of, “Oh well, maybe it wasn’t what they wanted to see.”
But Chris’ trainer, Nancy Renfro, saw it differently. “I
was walking back to the stalls after the class, and I kept thinking something wasn’t quite right,”
Nancy, said.
Nancy
knew when she saw Chris, she would not be able to explain
why her pattern wasn’t good enough to get her back to the finals. A few other trainers that had
been watching echoed Nancy’s thoughts, and Nancy and Chris thought that before they
asked what had happened, they needed to take the time to double check. So they watched
the video to make sure Chris had done the pattern correctly, which she had.
After
watching the video, Nancy was still shaking her head. Fellow trainer Jill Briggs
told Nancy she would go with her to the office if she wanted. So the two inquired
with AQHA who handled the situation very swiftly, and definitively.
Turns out there had been a clerical error, and that was what kept Chris out of
the rail work. Once AQHA identified what happened, the decision was made to allow
Chris to participate into the finals.
She
ended up winning.
