"Practice the half-pass like in the Prix St. Georges test—half-pass to the centerline, flying change and half-pass back,” coach Missy Ransehousen’s voice rings across the quiet indoor arena.

For the rider, reigning U.S. para-equestrian champion Becca Hart, asking for the half-pass can be a challenge.

Becca was born with familial spastic paraplegia, a condition that weakens muscles and causes lack of lower-body control. It makes walking awkward and balance occasionally precarious because of muscle spasms, never mind the difficulty it adds to riding, mucking stalls, cleaning water buckets and doing the other duties of a working student. But she does all that without a second thought.

She has to. She knows she must stay active and on her feet if she wants to maintain the muscle strength necessary to continue riding, to continue walking.

On Becca’s path from horse-crazy suburban girl to where she is today—the highest-placed U.S. rider in the 2008 Paralympics in Hong Kong, finishing fourth in the Grade II Freestyle. Her disability has been only one hurdle to overcome. The other hurdles—developing her skills to this level; finding and affording international-caliber horses; teaching them to adapt to her; balancing school, work and riding—have been equally daunting in their own ways.

As she prepares to move up to Prix St. Georges, her body isn’t cooperating to properly cue the half-pass during her lesson at Missy’s Blue Hill Farm in Unionville, Pennsylvania. When her legs work their best, she can squeeze a little. But to effectively cue “Pippin,” her partner of four years, to move away from her weaker left leg in the half-pass requires contorting her body in such a way that her right hip cues him to move right.

It’s frustrating, but Becca is figuring out how to work through it. Learning to adapt and persevere is nothing new.

Getting Started

It took plenty of perseverance just to get 10-year-old Becca into riding lessons. After discovering horses at summer camp, she begged her parents for regular lessons. So her dad, Terry Hart, a database analyst, and mom, Sue Dobson, a writing tutor and librarian, started calling around their hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, looking for a lesson barn.

“My parents called around, telling [instructors], ‘We have this disabled girl …’ and it was easier for them to say no on the phone,” she says. “So they decided we’d just go to the next place in person.”

That place was Hobbyhorse Farm, where instructor Ray Herhold was nonplussed by the disability of the little girl standing in front of him.

Over the next few years, Becca learned to walk, trot, canter and, eventually, jump. Over 2-foot-6 courses, her competitive nature began to assert itself.

“I rode in local hunter shows, and I always lost in equitation because I couldn’t get my heels down,” she says. “I liked winning, so I stuck with the hunters.”

Becca’s mother learned about para-equestrian competition through a Practical Horseman article about the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics. She read about riders with disabilities using borrowed horses and how they were classified to compete against people with comparable disabilities.

Even though Becca considered herself a jumper rider, and at the time deemed dressage “boring” (she’s since grown to love the sport), she was nonetheless intrigued by the idea of competing nationally or internationally. The Harts changed their summer vacation plans, packed up the car and went on a two-week camping trip in Georgia so that Becca could take part in a para-equestrian event near Atlanta.

The show gave Becca an invaluable introduction to the para-equestrian community. By the time it ended, the 13-year-old had garnered an invitation to spend a week with Linda Fritsch, a well-respected coach in para-equestrian sport.

“Coming back from the ’98 show, I said, ‘Wow, that was really fun. Mom, Dad, I want to go to the Paralympics.’”

Never Saying “I Can’t”

To develop from a kick-and-pull rider who could do basic flatwork to an effective, educated dressage rider, Becca spent her high school years working closely with both Stephanie Rickerson, who had taken over for Ray Herhold when he retired, and Linda Fritsch, whose Ohio farm she traveled to during the summers and other school vacations.

“She has a very, very difficult disability to work with,” Linda says. “For her to become a rider, her saving grace was her determination and her openness. She never said ‘I can’t.’”

Her other great strength was her empathy. “She had that innate ability to understand her horses and work with them, and that’s a big part of riding, a big part of her success,” Linda says.

It helped Becca become a trainer even as she was very much on the learning curve herself. With the first competition horse she owned, a Rhinelander named Beckon who had shown through Second Level, she developed a code of clucks and taps with the whip that allowed her to ask for more advanced work, more subtle differences, without full use of her legs. She taught him cues not just to change gaits, but to change within the gaits—one type of cluck meant trot, for example, while a different type meant add more expression or bigger steps to that trot.

“That worked until we got to laterals, and as the work got harder, I realized I couldn’t create all these different cues and have them specialized enough for him to understand,” she says. “Instead, I needed to go back to fine-tuning my body control. By then, I was more comfortable in the sitting trot, relaxing into the movement, and I was able to start using muscles that had been spasming in the past.”

Although she no longer relies heavily on it, Becca keeps that system of clucks and taps in her tool bag. She uses it as a fallback for when she has a muscle spasm that leaves her temporarily “full-paralyzed” and unable to use her legs. She’s also trained other para-equestrians’ horses to understand the system, giving them a means of communication that doesn’t rely on standard leg aids.

Trying for a Team

Becca began working in barns early on, mucking stalls, feeding horses and cleaning tack to offset her lesson and board expenses. By college, she was working part-time in the barn, part-time in an accounting office and pursuing a degree in accounting at Penn State University—all while training with Linda and Stephanie in hopes of making the 2004 Paralympic Team.

“We spent hours in the barn, and no matter what I asked her to do, she never shirked, she just dug in and did it,” Linda says.

Working in the barn helped with day-to-day costs, but there was little Becca could do to offset the price of a competitive dressage horse. To afford Beckon, Becca recalls (with awe and gratitude still in her voice) that her parents remortgaged their home.

A few years later, however, a change in para-equestrian rules forced them to start looking again: Beginning with the 2004 Paralympics in Athens, instead of catch-riding horses provided by the host country, riders would compete on their own mounts. That drastically increased the level of competition, the rigor of the judging—and the quality of the horses. Beckon, with whom she won at Second Level in open shows, wasn’t fancy enough for international para-equestrian competition.

Becca upgraded to an impressive Latvian Warmblood with Third Level experience, generously free-leased to her through the 2004 Paralympics by Erie businessman Alan Renkis. The horse was easily up to the task, Becca says, but she wasn’t yet skilled enough to package his 17-hand frame and ride his big movement well.

They didn’t make the 2004 team. Instead, Becca was named as a traveling alternate—something she regarded as both an honor and a disappointment.

“Going to the Paralympics was my lifelong goal. Going as an alternate didn’t reach it,” she says. “So many people had put so much into me—financially, physically, emotionally—and I couldn’t repay them financially. The only way I could repay them was to do the best job I can. I thought, I have to go work with someone who has been in the big international scene and knows it.”

Keeping Her Promise

Becca’s current horse, Nortessa, was a castoff from the formidable British para-equestrian squad, purchased after the 2004 Games through another Herculean family effort. She learned firsthand about both the talent that had attracted the Brits to “Pippin” and the bad habits that pushed them away: The Hanoverian spooked easily and could get so revved he was nearly unridable. He had a buck that could unseat the best able-bodied riders and was prone to throwing “Pippin fits” when he felt too pressured.

Becca frequently took him to Missy Ransehousen for help, and in fall 2007 decided to take a year off school to be a working student and focus on riding.

Settling Pippin, making him more ridable and more consistent, was one of the main goals. To that end, Missy prescribed regular exposure to the things that got him excited, including regular showing during a winter spent in Florida.

“It was night and day for us, the exposure to shows, the exposure to riding in different places, riding outside and riding twice a day, which I’d never been in a position to do,” Becca says of her Florida competition season.

The exposure paid off at the U.S. Para-Equestrian Championships in May 2008. “Every test, he strutted out of the warm-up and did tests that were relaxed and happy and swinging,” Becca says. “I couldn’t stop thinking how much I love my horse. It was my best show ever with him.”

With a final score of 72.473, Becca and Pippin were crowned national champions. More importantly, after 12 years of work, she made the Paralympic team. They were headed to China.

Prix St. Georges and Beyond

Arriving in Hong Kong, Pippin became a bit overwhelmed by the atmosphere and the spooky competition arena. He tensed and returned to some of his old habits during the first two tests, with disappointing results. But on the final day of the competition, the pair executed a near-flawless Freestyle that put them in fourth place.

“It was disappointing to not come home with a medal when we’d been so close, but going to Hong Kong was a lifelong goal and a great experience,” Becca says. “I was the highest-ranking American rider on a horse I had grown up with and really worked through a lot with to get to that point. He’s growing up, and that in itself was a huge victory for us.”

Anything that happens from here forward is just icing, she says, though she wants to keep working with Pippin to see how far they can go.

Her working-student year over, she’s back in college to complete her final year. To continue riding with Missy, Becca transferred to a Penn State satellite campus near Blue Hill Farm and took a full-time job at a local Starbucks. Her shifts typically run from about 4 a.m. to noon, at which point she heads for the barn. On days she doesn’t have classes, she helps out at the barn to offset her bills. She’s also garnered her first equipment sponsor in Supracor saddle pads. She returned to Florida for the winter, and in February made her Prix St. Georges debut with Pippin.

If he continues to feel happy and “grown-up” in his work, Becca will aim the 16-year-old toward the World Equestrian Games in 2010—the first time able-bodied and para-equestrian competitions will be held together.

Former coach Linda Fritsch hopes to see more people like Becca become involved in the sport. “We haven’t really tapped into the resources we have in this country,” she says, adding, “but I don’t care if there were 150 (para-equestrian) riders, Becca would still be in the top five.

“I don’t know any parents who sacrificed so much for their child’s dream, and she recognized that. She doesn’t take any of it for granted. She’s had some luck along the way, and she made the most of it. She was always willing to take whatever challenge was presented. Without that, without her hard work, it never would have happened.”