The Red River Roping and Riding Arena will be hosting people from across the province this week. (submitted photo/Larry Henry)

By Jeff D'Andrea

Red River Roping and Riding

Red River Roping and Riding Arena quiet during pandemic

May 28, 2020 | 5:29 PM

When the snow starts to disappear and the sun shines through the cloudless prairie sky, that’s usually when the Red River Roping and Riding Arena (RRRR) is at its busiest.

But for the first time since its founding in the late 1960s, that hasn’t been the case. The arena has been forced to close its doors since March 23 due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The Saskatchewan Horse Federation has cancelled their season’s worth of events. The Prince Albert Exhibition, which featured some horse shows, has also been shutdown. The arena’s own events calendar is largely blank as well. With their facilities not being able to open, they’ve lost a lot of their business.

“It’s extremely trying and difficult for the board. The week that it was announced that we had to close, we lost 17 boarders that moved their horses home. Since then, we probably lost another 10 just because we can’t have any activity on the grounds,” RRRR director Larry Henry said. “We had to send all our penning calves home and all the roping calves went back to their owners. It’s a pretty quiet place right now. We ended up laying off our staff. We just have a casual bookkeeper, an accountant right now. The board is basically picking up the slack.”

RRRR are drafting proposals to raise funds and to receive grants from the government because at the moment, all the ways they’ve been able to make money in the past have been shut down during the pandemic. And as Henry aptly puts it, “the bills don’t stop.”

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“We’ve been an institution that’s been around for 48 years and the board has always prided ourselves for funding the arena ourselves. We’ve lost our streams our revenue which was our Spring Fling, our sanctioned penning that would’ve been held this past weekend,” Henry said. “Our summer camp is a larger fundraiser for us, boarding helps us pay some of the bills. We’re scrambling, but we’re hoping when we get back to some normalcy, we can hit the ground running. And it’s difficult to find ground because we don’t have a relationship with other government agencies that maybe fund programs.”

What could be a little bit of good news will be the arena’s summer camps, which will start at the beginning of July. The camps registration is almost full, but RRRR will have to wait until Phase 4 of the Re-Open Saskatchewan plan put out by Premier Scott Moe before they can hold them.

The Lakeland Ford High School Rodeo is also tentatively on the schedule at the end of the summer, but that can only get going if crowds of 250-300 are allowed to gather in one place.

Both of those events are at the mercy of the guidelines put in place.

“If we don’t get to Stage 4, we have nothing going on,” Henry said.

As hard as this situation might be at the time, Henry is confident that the club will recover.

“We’re a resilient bunch. We’ll get through this and we’ll be ready to go whenever the premier says we can reopen. I’m positive we’ll find a way to keep working. It’s always been done by fundraising and volunteerism, we just have to hope that our volunteers remain strong and our fundraising will bounce back.”

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Jeff.dandrea@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @jeff_paNOW