What is Un-aff SJ comming to?

I tend to steer well clear of unaffiliated around here although there are always tons of entries. The main reason is the courses - for example last weekend our local riding club had an unaffiliated jumping day and it looked as if no one could be bothered to set the course up properly, they had driven the jump trailer in the field and set the course up around it so they didn't have to carry the jumps too far! And this was the riding club - building a course designed for ponies, far too tight for horses. The decent centres around here do have good courses though and consequently have a huge number of entries.
 
Like you I remember the 'good ol days' when unaff went to 3'6"...and it was a proper 3'6" too. Back then though affiliated classes STARTED at 3'3" (Discovery) and went up from there. An affiliated 3'3" always rode more like an unaff 3'6" too I guess because of the extra width and technicality
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What has happenned now is all the better unaff riders who would never stand a chance at Newcomers or above are jumping BN, Disco and all the other small opens / amateur classes. The prize money is better and also guaranteed unlike unaff where you are lucky to get your entry fee back if you win
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The other thing that has added to the clutter in the lower end BSJA is the advent of open/amateur classes. Back 'then' once your horse jumped out of a class (say Discovery) there was nothing else of that height to jump...you had to move up to the next level. Obviously there are major benefits of the new way but the downside is that horses that would otherwise revert to unaff when they reached their limit now stay and contest small classes......and hence the most recent phenomenon......the Grade A that has never jumped bigger than 1.10m
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You would think that Trailblaizers would bridge the gap between unaff and aff a bit more.... as I believe thats what it was set up to do. At our local TB centre the 95 and 105 have very few entries....
However, the 'end prize' of the TB series has become such a financial outlay... I think this puts people off...
At least aff classes offer decent prizes as you go....
I agree that lots of people go affliated now as the courses start off so small and it just sounds good to say you are affiliated.... However just as many go because they need decent, well built courses on reliable ground, which local shows just don't offer.
 
I was replying to a post about competing not learning to ride.

Yes I do work in health and safety and advacate sensible H&S not scare stories. I have also helped some equine businesses deal with it in a sensible way.

Do not confuse H&S law with the requirements from insurance companies, often two very different things!

Interesting that most of the posts point to doing the aff competitions as they are run to higher standards!
 
When I was a child, there was usually just 12.2hh, 13.2hh, 14.2hh, novice and open at unaffiliated shows. There was no discrimination between horses and ponies in the novice and open - all competed together. Our local show - the 14.2hh class was about 3'6", the novice was 3'3" and the open was 4'. The only thing I would say was the courses were a lot less technical then - they tended to be big and bold courses with not so many distance questions as you get even in intro level BSJA now.
 
I think we should go even further back to the good old days when classes were split by height of pony. The 14.2 and open classes at local and agricultural shows were really big, highly competitive and you could win proper prizes. 14.2 class used to be about 3ft 6 and open jumping 3ft 9 to 4ft. What has gone wrong, I along with the rest of the world seem to think 3ft 6 is big now.....
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ditto. There are far too many people competing in and winning the 2ft the 2ft 3 and the 2ft 6 week in and week out. No skill, no challenge.....
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In the good old days they would have had to compete in their height class once out of the novice and either give up or improve!

I used to jump foxhunters & Grade B & C classes many years ago, but he biggest course I ever jumped was the open at the Pytchly Hunt Supporters show - bloody huge & unaffiliated!!
 
I have a bit of a problem with the majority of unaffiliated shows in our area - most of them are totally rubbish!!! We have one good local unaffiliated venue and some of the local agricultural shows have a BSJA course builder but other than these places I simply don't want to go to unaffiliated shows. I don't understand how it can be so difficult to build a decent course!!? It really annoys me!! The striding is always wrong and it's as if they can't be bothered to get half the poles out most of the time. Then they are often badly run. Another thing that is rubbish about unaffiliated - it's not even much cheaper than BSJA but you win naf all.
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Can you tell I don't like unaffiliated shows?
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I think like someone else said it's because we have better standards now - as in we expect a better service.

Having said all that I'm off to an unaffiliated show tonight!! I don't bother with my horse but my dads TB isn't up to affiliated yet.. and we are going to the good venue mentioned above.
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Another problem I see, is that there really aren't many unaffiliated local shows any more! When I first started competing, and even up to about 7 years ago we had about 6 good local shows in the summer, within about a 5 mile radius of where we were based, the unaff with courses up to 3ft 6 and one which also had aff juniors and seniors. Now only 1 of these remains, and there's a lot less at it and no juniors at all. The local places we used to use over winter now no longer hold shows. Doesn't really leave us much choice but to affiliate, we have very few unaff venues, the ones still there are often on poor ground, on a considerable slope, distances wrong, way under height, and even excluding all these issues, are only run over 3 months of the year
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I swapped to affiliated because I preffered doing the first class of the day (and the 2nd if feeling brave) rather than having to guess what time to turn up and either panic and rush or hang about endlessly waiting for the last class of the day.
This is going back about 6 years don't have a jumping horse any more.
 
I agree with a lot of the above, ie the lower classes at BSJA now have probably played a large part in killing off the bigger opens at local shows.

I know as soon as we were capable of jumping a 3' course I switched to affiliated - partly due to the reliability of courses as already mentioned but also, as Tigger_Alfie said above, I would far prefer to go and jump the 1st/2nd/3rd classes rather than do the last class of the day which can often end up being gone 5pm on a Sunday.

I suppose it's a bit of a vicious circle too - the more people that go BSJA, the less enter the bigger unaff classes, therefore less bigger classes are run so more people go BSJA etc etc......
 
again as Jul above said, the bigger classes aren't on at our local venue until about 9:30 pm on a Friday night, if ever at all now! My friend has a young horse who she plans to event and wanted to do lots of unaff opens but she was constantly one of 2 entered in the class, and as they were split horses and ponies she never had to jump off which is what she went to get her horse used to doing!
I suppose in this situation it isn't cost effective for the show to keep the lights on and the helpers there past 9pm so they don't run the bigger classes.
 
re Rambo's comments, I had sort of forgotten that, yes once horse was out of Newcomers you then had Foxhunter and Grade C, nothing else. Remember driving miles in a very old lorry with one horse so as to find a Foxhunter and then a small Grade C (prob around 4') as my mare's physically limit really was at about that level although she tried her little heart out. Without the type of classes there are now, we had to stop jumping affiliated once she had won too much money to go into the classes she could physically jump. Can't really comment about quality of local shows but definitely a lot of the old fashioned village shows have gone. Happy days jumping with one little ex racehorse kept at DIY livery against people like John Whittaker in Foxhunter classes, love that about horses classes however amateur you are you compete against the best.
 
The H&S aspect does come in a little, but not, I think, just because people used to be brave and now they're pathetic.
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As someone else noted smaller local shows with high standards are harder and harder to come by and I think this has a lot to do with expenses. One of the major costs now is insurance - both the actual policy and meeting the requirements to avoid negligence claims - we may not like it but it's a fact of life now.

I think people are also somewhat more likely to feel they're "entitled" to complain now but at the same time it's harder and harder to get people to help out to make things better. With rising costs and more grief many smaller places that run mostly on volunteer labour eventually decide it's simply not worth it.
 
I think its because people who have horses that can jump 1.05 plus affiliate so that they can jump on good surfaces etc.
At the last un-aff Keysoe I went to there were lots in the 95cm and it was built to BSJA standard (good, wide, up-to height). I think if they had had a 1.05 there would have been quite a few.
 
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re Rambo's comments, I had sort of forgotten that, yes once horse was out of Newcomers you then had Foxhunter and Grade C, nothing else. Remember driving miles in a very old lorry with one horse so as to find a Foxhunter and then a small Grade C (prob around 4') as my mare's physically limit really was at about that level although she tried her little heart out. Without the type of classes there are now, we had to stop jumping affiliated once she had won too much money to go into the classes she could physically jump. Can't really comment about quality of local shows but definitely a lot of the old fashioned village shows have gone. Happy days jumping with one little ex racehorse kept at DIY livery against people like John Whittaker in Foxhunter classes, love that about horses classes however amateur you are you compete against the best.

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Think we must have been competing under very similar circumstances ! I was out and about around 1982 to 1987 on a 15.3hh ex flat racer who was jumping Foxhunter (until we won too much
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) and Grade C / B&C classes. I seem to recall there weren't too many of the smaller Grade C classes (probs around 1.25m in today's money) and we had to jump more B&C's which were 4'3" or more (1.30m). It was a right pain too if you or your horse lost confidence as there was nothing to step back down to for a while without jumping HC which just seemed like a waste of an entry fee
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I don't jump really but my view on it is this.
It seems to me that peer pressure on teenagers is getting worse and therefore they think they 'have' to affiliate to prove how good they are to everyone else. When I was younger everyone used to go unaff and have a good time and it wasn't until you were winning everything that parents could be persuaded to pay to affiliate to BSJA.
However now the teenagers want to affiliate because that means they are so much better than everyone else and the parents don't know how to say 'no'.
It's a vicious circle in my opinion and is the reason the bigger classes are empty at unaff and the smaller classes at BSJA are big.
Also explains why the heights at local RC are getting smaller as they are getting more entrants, rather than running bigger classes and getting none!

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I agree with this. I haven't really competed for ages now, but when I was doing the local circuit with Jasper most things were 3ft, with the odd one 3ft3 - only one went up to 3ft6. Its very frustrating, as I couldn't afford to affiliate and its so difficult to find decent sized courses if you don't.

Even then, most of the people I was competing with were those already affiliated BE or BSJA, just out taking theirs for a school.
 
I affiliated my 13yr old daughter this year, there is quite a few unaff comps around here but like others have said the distances aren't always right, often horse striding which is no good for a pony, although my biggest gripe was the older kids taking their 15.2's in the mini/midi classes rosette hunting - these were not young horses either which i would understand, you would see them every week! Their excuse usually was its a warm up round - then go HC and give the little kids a chance. Since affiliating shes been doing really well, comps are well organised and you know what to expect.
 
gamebird- yes i did the premier sj at port royal and also richmond but the 95 and 105 were at northallertone where they always seem to be busy.
 
Me and my friend have said many times that we will never win a class at RC as unschooled horses can wizz round over 75cm risking falls and bad striding, and win the class, as the horse can sort its self out at small hights. I think these riders find that when the jumps start to go up they actually need to be able to ride. Shorten, lenghten, see a stride ect.

I am not the best rider by any strech, but I,m aware that I need to keep up my lessons.

Also I will not jump my horse round over tight, badly arranged courses.
 
I was shocked the other day to realise that I was jumping 3'9 opens on my pony - and that was the norm back then.

I use unaffiliated to get my eye back in after a break from BSJA. Luckily around here all the unaff stuff is built by BSJA judges over BSJA jumps. There seemed to be enough entries up to about 1m.
 
Well, our local RC must buck the trend!

They run classes from 60cm to 1.10m. Whereas a few years ago it was as you described, loads at the bottom and none at the top, over the last 2 years it has very much gone the other way.

Now the lower height classes are smaller and the 90cm and above are well subscribed. Ok, they dont have massive entries, but 10 ish in each class.

The courses on the whole are well built using plenty of fillers and decent size spreads. Those jumping the 1.10m know they've jumped it, with most of the fences being maximum height. Thats has to be said for all the classes. The height on the schedule is the height of most of the fences - bar the forst couple. None of this 5-10cm lower stuff.
 
THat's exactly what happened top me when I saw an interpretation of heights on the Hand website. I have this thing about jumping bigger than 1m now. Back in the day I was happily popping round 3ft 9 & bigger and thinking it was small, on a pony. On a horse I was jumping well over 4ft. Why have I allowed myself to be convinced that 1m 10 is large, it's a bit depressing.
 
I think that BSJA is so much more accessible now with 70cm upwards that people expect a lot more from shows. It seems that unaff is a dying breed almost! And i tihnk as we are all alot more aware of ground conditions, health and safety, well run venues, etc, so alot more people now do BSJA/BE/BD...
 
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