Galloping beauties -- a lifetime addiction

Horse lovers bring their riding skills to compete in Tampa.

By BEN MONTGOMERY
Published June 24, 2007

TAMPA - Stall 47 smells like hay and horse dung. The little girl inside looks like an angel.

The horse is named Honey, and she's the color of crust. The girl is Shelby Curtsinger, and she wears ribbons in her hair.

She's been on horses since she wore diapers. She shovels stalls, rides for an hour and a half three times a week, and feeds Honey pellets and grain and carrots. And sometimes watermelon.

Shelby of Bradenton is 9 now, and she rides with the grace of royalty, which is one of the reasons she's here at the Pinellas County Hunters Association nonrated show at the Bob Thompson Equestrian Center on the Florida State Fairgrounds.

The competitors range in age from 2 to 75, and riders compete in the explicit style of show hunters and jumpers. The club moved the competition to Tampa about 15 years ago because a suitable space for running and jumping horses is hard to come by anymore in Pinellas.

Jeanne Hatch knows all about that.

The 76-year-old, who grew up Pinellas County working cattle on horseback, remembers riding from 38th Avenue to Redington Beach to let her horse swim when school let out for the summer.

As Pinellas filled up, she moved to Brooksville for the open spaces. And she still rides, even though she broke her neck in a fall at a competition last year.

The club has been around for more than 50 years, said secretary Michelle Drain of Pinellas Park. And all the kids competing this weekend are the future of the link between man and horse.

Back at stall 47, Shelby's mother stands outside. Jenn Curtsinger never had a horse growing up in Tampa. She tied a rope on her bike and pretended it was a bridle.

Her folks took her to ride at the B&R Ranch in Tampa. She fell in love with a horse named Pebbles. Every day she got to ride, the kids would line up and race to the barn, hair and elbows flying. First one there got the first pick.

Jenn always got Pebbles. And she always told her parents that she'd own horses when she grew up.

Now she smiles when she watches Shelby ride.

"It's so in her," Jenn says. "It's in her blood."

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or 813 310-6066.

[Last modified June 23, 2007, 23:14:24]