The New Hope Horse Club (NHHC) out of Stoughton made Canada Day special for local spectators.
For over a year, members who formed a team named the NHHC Shadows, led by coach DeeAnn Lyke, were practising for a musical ride, and the performance on July 1 turned out great. Estevan's 14-year-old Bristol Madu, riding a Friesian Gelding named Braumm, was the leader of the show.
"It takes a great amount of skill, dedication and practice to be a part of a musical choreographed show while on horseback," said Angel Madu, who is involved with the club.
"Our musical ride drill team did exceptional. We had around 50 people come out to watch and support us."
The group consists of 11-55-year-old female riders, with some coming from Fillmore and Estevan, but the core residing in Stoughton.
The club started practising drill rides about three years ago. They did perform the first year, and this was their first performance with the new group of riders. The club is open to anyone, but it requires serious commitment as members need to meet every week to practise the drill together.
"It's a really big time commitment, so that's usually the biggest determining factor, people are not sure if they can commit to the weekly practices because you have to make sure you have your whole team there, otherwise, it's very difficult to practice," said Lyke.
Practises for the drill started last year, and this year the group decided that they wanted to perform. Things turned out the way they wanted. Now they plan on continuing with performing.
"We decided that we would have it for Canada Day because then it would be a day off for people. So it's nice to have a little bit of a crowd. And there weren't really too many other Canada Day plans. That's how we picked the performance date for this year. And we've put out a couple of other invites to places. So we know we have rodeo next year, already. And we're looking to get a couple more performances this year," Lyke said.
The program was selected based on music preferences. It took a lot of songs and brainstorming, and it turned out amazing.
"We all brainstorm. We would listen to different types of music and if we heard something that we liked, we bring it to our group. And everyone would listen to it and see if most people like the music, and then we'd listen to it while we ride to see if it would match the beat or the tempo of riding," Lyke explained.
"And then we just started narrowing it down from there. We started off with probably about 10 different genres of music and we had about two to three songs in each genre. We had to see if we liked how that sound worked for us and then we narrowed it down from there until we got down to our performance."
While Lyke said riders are currently working at about half of the potential speed, both the spectators and the girls themselves were excited about the show, and the group received great feedback. However, Lyke expects that as they keep working on their drills they will get even better, polishing the program and making it more difficult.
"One of the biggest challenges with performing in front of the crowd is that the horses aren't used to having people there watching. So having a crowd there adds some new challenges which are very difficult to practise for unless you have a crowd, so you have to do more performances and then your horses get more used to the noise and the action of the crowd," Lyke said.
After the performance the club decided to take a break, hoping to get back together for new gigs. They will open up to new members once they get back to their routine.
"We usually start our practices in February-March. We do a lot on foot, just getting our routine down ourselves. So usually that's when we would be accepting new members is in the early part of the year when we're putting the team together. And that's the group that would practise and ride together throughout the spring and the summer," Lyke said.
