Things are Rocking & Rolling in the Sooner State!

We are very excited to finally have everything we need to become an official WDAA affiliate, as of this afternoon!

Paula Walker at the 2012 Pinto World Show in Western Dressage

Paperwork will be in the mail to WDAA very shortly, but we’re already celebrating! Yahoo and Yeehaw! Special thanks go to our amazing advisory board member Phyllis Scott for her role in making this happen. The Oklahoma Western Dressage clinic originally scheduled for July is now re-set for Nov. 29-30 in Bartlesville. It’s called Classical Dressage Meets Western Dressage and will feature both a USDF-certified instructor and a natural horsemanship clinician. We want to explore the similarities (because after all, good horsemanship is good horsemanship) and what some of the differences will be. We will have both warmbloods and stock-type horses on hand so that we can do gait analyses; we’ll have sessions on saddle-fitting and bitting; and there will be lots of Q&A time for both participants and auditors. Feel free to contact me at hollyh101@yahoo.com if anyone is interested in attending.

Wonderful, incredible news … we are the recipient of a grant from The Dressage Foundation! This is so very exciting because:

1. It ensures that the Classical/Western clinic really will happen, and that we’ve got the resources to do it right, and
2. This is validation from a classical dressage organization that, yes, western dressage is “real dressage,” too.

In our application, we explained that our intention is to help make classical dressage training techniques (such as the training pyramid) both accessible and attractive to western riders.

Other reasons we’ve been so busy: We’re having a fund-raising tack sale in conjunction with a schooling show Sept. 9. We have a silent auction — with some really incredible artsy items — Oct. 27 in conjunction with another schooling show. And we’re gearing up to have a booth at the Color Breed Congress in Tulsa in early November.

A shout-out to our rockstar president, Paula Walker, for being the drive behind these things! And also to our treasurer Jolie Pressler, who laid so much of the groundwork for our organization, and to our brand-new vp, Julie Gooldy. We are cowgirls gettin’ things done! 🙂

Holly Clanahan
WDA-Oklahoma organizing committee secretary