We were just talking about this on the weekend, so it's funny to open this thread now & see that others have posted some of what we were saying here!
What it boils down to is we pretty much agree with what Stacy (Mountain Meadows) said about making these classes into true Grand Championships.
Right now they are kind of just another class, open to anyone that wants to stay right to the end of the show and put up the slightly higher entry fee to go into the class.
I was thinking back to the World Championship Morgan show. Their final 'highest honor' performance classes are the World Championship classes--true, those classes are open to anyone that wants to pay a high (very high) fee to enter, but the winners of the qualifying classes get a much reduced entry fee to go into these World Champion classes. I don't think entry was free, I'd have to check the book again as I haven't looked at it in a long time, but the entry for winners of the qualifying classes was much lower than what others have to pay to enter. And those World Championship wins are very prestigious--winners were considered the best of the best for that show.
From what I've seen from AMHR Nationals over the last few years, many exhibitors leave the show before the end, choosing for whatever reason to not wait around to compete in the stake/championship driving classes. These classes are stakes more than "championships". In Morgans it would be unthinkable to leave the show prior to competing in the World Championship performance classes, especially if your horse won any of the qualifying classes. In AMHR, depending who the winners of the qualifying classes were, they may or may not stay for the stake class at the end--you may have all or some of the class winners in there, and it may be that most are some that weren't the top winners in the previous classes.
I am not saying any of this to take away from anyone who won this year. I'm just saying that there must be some way to make these classes more prestigious than they are--prestigious to everyone that is in AMHR and has any interest at all in the show world. In Morgans for instance, you would never hear people saying that the World Championship harness and saddle classes don't have the same prestige as the World Championship halter classes. I'm not quite sure why it's not quite the same in AMHR?
