The Natural Dressage Forum

Help me out here. I would like to compete in 2nd level this year, but I'm not sure hwat my exact goals should be.

There are regionals.
There is bronze medal.
There is all breeds.

But I don't know much about any of them, and I do not yet have USDF membership to get access to the online rule book. Anyone have any suggestions?

Part of me still just wants to do demos and not compete, but another part wants to know if I can actually ride to the letter.

Well technically you can go for all at the same time. You have to be a USDF member and the horse needs a membership. I usually go ahead and do lifetime for my horses, plus USEF membership for you and horse. You end up spending a bunch of $ before you even go to your first competition!

Then for all breeds all you need to do is send in a copy of papers on the horse. Usually you have membership with breed registry as well.

With that, your scores will apply to all of above. There are qualifying scores for regionals (not sure what they are these days) usually in front of more than one judge and a certain percentage. Bronze requires scores from 1-3rd levels at a certain percentage. You can also get a training level certificate for certain percentage scores.

Keep up with your tests. I keep all of my copies of originals for each horse. It is miuch easier these days with digital recordings of scores, you used to have to get secretary to sign test and then send in copies with a score report! Now I believe it is all done by computer, at least it was for breed shows.

Showing is a good test of your work, but you can also just show at schooling shows (I find them more fun and laid back) to get a similar experience. Very often GMOs will have their own awards in addition to USDF awards and the schooling shows count for GMO awards. When I get back into showing with my youngster I will be aiming for schooling shows for awhile, mainly because they are so much cheaper. If I get to the point of having him at 3rd or better then I will dabble back into the recognized shows. But man you can drop $1000 easy on just a weekend show! The trend has become to have two shows one each day of the weekend to maximize scores. That doubles everything like show fees, etc. Major bucks involved.