Well we are home from the great state of New York and we are starting to think about the 2018 season already for The Rebel Soule.  This year was a rough start with the ground and timer issues but you know what they say “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”  Hell who are we kidding our saying is “Well we are gonna have to start drinking earlier today!”

The week started off heading west on Monday to wait for crew to pull in on Tuesday to get the place ready for our guest for the weekend.   It is always a long week coming to NY but we love the people and the facility is great to work with.

We want to Thank each person who came to the show to enjoy the weekend. From the ones who brought their kids to run to the ones who came to find their confidence again to the ones who came to lay it all on the line.   We honestly love to see each of you come through the gates to be with us for the weekend.   We get to meet so many new people and enjoy people we now call friends from the past years.

Jen Bruno and gang Thank you for being part as always of the festivities.  Always a blast and glad you stayed out of the Sasquatch pond out back this time. To all the kids and others who dressed for the parade and in your Red White and Blue – We loved them all.  Michele Waldo and crew Thank you so much for being all you are and always with a smile and a kind word.  Love you ladies and those little pouches of Sangria OULALA – You need to patent them.  To the Grey Goose gang who signed the GG bottle – that will be my emergency bottle for future shows that have issues.  Thank you for all the great contestants who came to enjoy the food, drinks and listen to our guy Dean Meadows for the weekend.

The Bloody Mary and The Margarita Bar will be back at the BOTB –

Barb CT Conkle and Dawn (she is allowed at the bar again) will be practicing their Tom Cruise skills for the festivities.  We hope you enjoyed both of those homemade fine tuned beverages.  We will also be having The Wing Fest back this year – Watch for the Theme!

Thank you for all the Sponsors who are always amazing and we hope you enjoyed the dinner we cooked for you.   The Road Crew – well we couldn’t do this without you that is for sure – we enjoy and love each of you for all your vacation days from work and all your hard work at the shows to make them run so smooth. Davis Ins, GameTime, JHA, and Speedy T’s and all the other sponsors for being here with us!

Thank you to The Soule Family for asking us to include the Heart and Soule into The Rebel Soule in honor of Pete’s memory.  The senior awards this year were amazing and in abundance in honor of Pete, we collectively decided to award the seniors extra awards in the memory of Pete and his love of barrel racing. Thank you for getting those sponsors so we could have those awards

Now to get down to the nitty gritty that everyone wants to talk about and get the elephant in the room out of the way.

The Ground

First – we did not put on our list of “Things to do at The Rebel Soule”

 

✅ Wake up and say I think today we will give the racers shitty ground!

✅ Make sure to have timer issues

✅ Piss people off because of it!

We will tell you one thing, we never knew there were so many tractor drivers, ground experts and generally people who know how to fix the ground from the bleachers.  From the comment ” Do you see that out there?” to “what are you going to do about this ground, anything?” and our personal favorite ” You are doing this on purpose to make the ground good and faster at the end of the night for the add ons!”  (By the way this person’s rider placed in the top ten and ran in the first 60 horses on the first day) hummmmm let us think about this….

And the answer to all those ridiculous statements are – Of course we knew we were having ground issues and we were doing all we could to fix it and try and make it as safe as we can with what we had.   We have been doing this for 7 years now and having 2 shows of not so good ground – pretty good odds but not what we like to see!  Think if when a barrel racer came out and had a horrible run we would say “Wow that didn’t look good at all!”, you know it, we know it, but there is no reason to state the obvious in a rude manner.   You think you were pissed, upset, freakin out about the ground, times that by 100 for us and the Tractor Drivers!

We also stood in the stands to listen to people say ” They must not know how to do clean good ground!” And that was the same exact person who personally said to me 30 mins prior ” We all run on the same ground – good or bad – and it is your choice to run your horse or not run your horse! Tell them to teach their horse to pick their feet up and run better”   To all of this we say – ” Shit happens and sometimes you have to roll with what you have and do all you can to make the best of a tough situation”. To the lovely GiGi that said, ” Thank you for trying to fix it and getting it better as the weekend went on” we say THANK YOU for the ray of light and to all the others who said Thank you for doing all you do and understand we were doing the best we could with what we had.  As they say, “You cannot make chicken salad out of chicken shit, no matter how much you try it is still chicken shit!”  People compared the ground to last year and unfortunately it was not the same material this year hence the issues.  But you cannot compare ground from one day/one show to the next there are always variables.

We can argue forever what should have been done but until you are in that tractor from 6 am Friday morning til 7 pm Sunday night with a total of 7 hours of sleep in a 60-hour time span and know what the ground is doing from that seat and not the stands or in your cozy bed sleeping in the am then you probably should think before you speak.  As all of us know – Opinions are like Aholes – everyone has one!   There is a million ways to address a situation act like an adult and hope for compromise at the end of the day solve the problem.

So with all that being said.

Congrats to the all the Winners and To the Top money earners Way to Go

Stall, Office Fee, All Opens and all Sidepots (including the 50K) Totaled – $389 One Horse for a chance to win part of over $70,000 in cashola

Pretty Good Pay for a weekend of doing what we all love!

Leslie Richards-$4649

Heather Kosmowski-$4523

Amy Albright-$4247

Wendy Chestnut-$3751

Katie Bridger’s-$3496

Mike Hulsinger-$3132

Jason Kiphart-$3087

These exclude Roadies ECSIF FF PBRIP

Thank you to the ones who were so understanding and caring about our issues on Friday and to the others who are “the typical barrel racer” – we hope you always have good ground where you go so you can always be happy.

Hell we hope we always have good ground as we always have and don’t run into these issues again but if we do we know we will do our best for all involved.

As always be kind to one another and have courage!

Lots of love to all and we will see you again on down the road!

Dawn and Clea