Back in December, Shelby French decided on six students to ride for Sweet Briar’s 2006 ANRC team. She felt good about the group’s strength, but the team – and her work – were only half finished.
“It’s the strongest group of riders I’ve ever had,” French, SBC’s riding program director, said. “Now we’re in the process of matching horses to riders. [In the ANRC] it’s a fifty-fifty thing. The partnership [between horse and rider] has to work.”
The
Affiliated National Riding Commission draws some of the best horse-and-rider teams from colleges around the country, so French and her staff spent several weeks in January working out five riders with Sweet Briar horses to make those all-important pairings. The sixth, senior
Christina Serio, will compete with her own horse,
Olympik.
Barring injuries that can alter the team’s makeup, along with Serio will be senior
Jodie Weber on
Hatrick, first-year
Alison Sims on
Renaissance, sophomore
Elizabeth Gold on
Braveheart, senior
Emily Wiley on
Closing and first-year
Lauren Guyer on
Remember.
Now that the students know their equine partners, training begins in earnest for the big prize – the ANRC Intercollegiate National Equitation Championships at St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, N.C., on April 22 and 23. Leading up to that event, Sweet Briar will host an ANRC Equitrial on April 14, and the team will compete in local and regional shows to prepare for the Nationals.
French also is planning a weekend training trip to Southern Pines, N.C., in March to “get everybody acclimated,” she said. Southern Pines is near Laurinburg, a place French knows well from her tenure at St. Andrews as the equine program director. The flat, sandy terrain poses different challenges from Sweet Briar’s hilly mix of slick red clay, grassy fields and deciduous woods.
“That’s why were going. I know the footing is really, really different there,” French said.
For more information about riding at Sweet Briar, please visit the
riding program web site.
– By
Jennifer McManamay,
SBC staff writer
