The Team Quest Regional Championships
Team Quest is run by British Dressage where teams of 4 compete in preliminary rounds all over the country and the top 15 from each area qualify for the regional finals. My friends, Molly, Kelsea, Erin and I were lucky enough to qualify for the Team Quest regional finals at Port Royal this weekend in our team Make Our Dream.
When we set off it was just getting light and it was really chilly even though it was only September but we were wearing our Tottie Team Colours jackets which helped keep us warm. When we arrived Katrina was quite excited so even though it was too early to warm up we decided that it would be best if I got on and quietly rode her around. To keep her calm I walked around for a long time, doing millions of serpentines just to get her listening and supple. This worked well until I asked her to trot and she became about as bendy as a brick! I kept working and soon the other girls joined me on their ponies, poor Molly had to leave her pony at home because she’d hurt her leg but the team decided she should still ride and Kelsea’s pony could manage 2 tests.
Eventually it was time for our test, we were last to go in the team and luckily everyone had gone well so it took the pressure off me a bit. Katrina was listening now and it all started off fabulous, I took a wide sweeping turn for A and we went meant business as we motored down that centre line. Until G. At G Katrina suddenly spotted the flowers and stopped dead. Katrina had never seen flower boxes like these before, these were truly impressive flower boxes and clearly potential horse eating ones. I had to resort to a Pony Club kick and she went warily forward, then surprisingly after the turn at C she started to settle and never looked at the flowers again! We made another couple of baby mistakes but she did some awesome canter work and as I went down the final centre line I was beaming, what a feeling!
I was so happy when I saw we’d scored 66%. The team held hands as we waited to find out whether we qualified as only the top 3 teams go through to the finals. The scores were really close and we were in the lead with 3 riders to go, but all 3 could have beaten us.
Finally the scores for the last riders were posted and we saw that we’d come second by 0.08 % WOW! That was so close, the third team were right on our heels too. The atmosphere was amazing, everyone cheered, we all said well done and filed out to get our rosettes on the podium which was amazing. I’ll never forget my first time standing on a podium. What competition day will you always remember?
Thank you to my amazing sponsors Stone House and The Emporium at Wentworth for making this possible Alanna xxx