InsIde AHA
Another role of NeOPS is to provide some guidelines for remuneration amounts for different jobs at a national show. Specific amounts are approved by the budget and Finance committee and AHA’s board of Directors. McDonald notes that the individual show commissions determine how best to implement operating policy based on their show’s budget; for example, when discussing the use of a separate judging panel for halter classes, “U.S. Nationals can afford a
separate team (of halter judges), but canada cannot, so they do a random draw of judges from the two panels of judges to get their five judge panel for halter.” Feedback from delegates and the general public is used to revise policy; such revisions include the outside photographer policy, which McDonald says was a response to outside photographers “taking shots from the rail, disrupting ring procedure, and impairing the official photographer’s sales.”
National Championship & Regional Classes Committee While NeOPS outlines the “how to’s” of daily operations for the national show commissions, the recommendations of which classes might be included at a national show fall to the National championship and regional classes committee. chaired by chris bickford, the largest committee in AHA seeks to “help the show commissions make decisions; we look at XYZ class. If we find that we have great support for the class throughout the U.S., with good numbers in those classes,” then the committee will approve a class for inclusion at the national shows. there is no hard and fast rule for the number of horses that must be shown throughout the U.S. in a particular class for that class to be considered for the national list. Instead, bickford comments that they like to have “a minimum of 20 exhibitors in a class, so there can be a full top ten; if there are only 20 horses showing throughout the U.S. in a class, not all 20 will come” to Nationals, which can result in smaller classes. the goal, of course, is to have large, full classes. bickford notes that the addition of Sport Horse Under Saddle Jtr at the 2011 Youth Nationals, which drew 54 entries, is a good example of how the process works.
Having at least 20 entries also allows a class to pay for itself. Although bickford states that budgeting does not play a large role in this committee, he notes that classes need to pay for themselves. the total cost for each class is estimated by “taking the total budget for the show and then dividing by the number of classes, approximately 176 for U.S. Nationals.” Age splits are not the specific purview of this committee; the show commissions or resolutions at convention determine whether age splits in a division are necessary. Something to note is that changes to classes (such as age splits) that are made at convention can be changed only through another resolution at convention. Specifications for classes (such as how classes are judged) are handled by the USeF Arabian breed/Discipline committee, and, by extension, USeF. In addition to adding classes to the national class list, the National championship and regional classes committee can also recommend that a class be suspended from the list if there are consistently no entries in that class. bickford recalls that “In the past, we used to have formal driving as a class for the Nationals. the committee did not dispense with the class, just suspended it so that the Nationals did not
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