Fence work credits Part A – boxing, rating, quality of the turns

Let’s go over ways that the score for a fence run can go up (or down) from a 70 by getting credit in the run content boxes. In this article I’ll go over boxing, rating and quality of the turns.

Boxing – your score can go up if you step right up and challenge your cow, and maintain excellent control over it, especially if there’s some degree of difficulty. If you can keep it in the middle 3/4 of the back wall ie not going fence to fence with it, that will help too. You also need to “tee your cow up” correctly to go through the corner smoothly, because that can make or break your run.

What will reflect negatively in that box is if you dawdle and don’t get into position and start working your cow, allow it to drag you around or go from fence to fence. If there’s a high degree of difficulty, but you don’t maintain position and control, you will be below average in that box. One of my pet peeves is when the horse isn’t in the bridle and doesn’t turn when asked, or puts his head the wrong way when he does. This can be addressed in the “eye appeal” box, in the “boxing” box, or both.

Another thing that happens frequently, is the rider’s trying to go, but the horse gets a little ahead and turns the cow back. I’m referring to before you actually get lined out, so it’s not a 1 point penalty. Instead, it’s usually considered a run content issue and will be reflected in the “boxing” box.

Rating – Rating is when the horse runs down the fence with the cow in perfect position to control it (neither too fast, nor slow, neither too far behind nor ahead), and then allows the rider to inch him past it, enabling him to perfectly synchronize his turn with the cow. Many runs start off with a good rate down the wall, but not so good coming back. Either the horse or the rider gets in too much of a hurry, or in exiting the turn, position was lost. This makes it necessary to accelerate too much to catch up, and then hard to throttle back before turning the cow. All of this causes the rhythm of the run to suffer. In order to credit that box, you need to rate the cow in above-average fashion both up and back.

Form and quality of turns – If your rate is good, you have a much better chance of your turn being above average. That’s because your horse is dialed in and going a speed only slightly faster than the cow when it turns. Set up like this, he should be able to nail it and exit well. There are 3 parts to the turn. They are: entering it, the turn itself and the exit. At no time during any part of this, should there be any separation between you and the cow. When the cow and horse synchronize the turn, and there’s speed, and perfect form. It’s hard not to gasp and even harder not to put a big + in the turn box!

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