Allison Springer: “Pony Club Saved Us
By Allison Springer | July 29, 2025
I just feel very lucky.
I was lucky I grew up without cell phones. I was lucky to be raised in Barrington, Illinois. I was lucky to kind of stumble into horses.
My parents grew up pretty poor—dad was from the south side of Chicago, mom from upstate New York. They were both animal lovers. My dad had a dream to one day have a little land and a tractor. My mom dreamed of being a veterinarian. Vet school wasn’t a reality for her so became a biology teacher instead, but they did get the land. They bought five raw acres in Barrington Hills just outside Chicago before it became anything huge and built the farm.
Horses weren’t really part of the plan. We got into them because I used to suck my thumb. True story.
I was in kindergarten and my dad said “You can have one thing, whatever you want, as long as you quit, but you have to completely quit today.” I think he thought I was going to ask for a Barbie doll. But I had ridden a pony that day for the first time, so that’s what I asked for.
My parents bought the neighbour’s pony for $15.
Her name was Marshmallow. We really didn’t know much about taking care of horses. Some of my early rides, it was my brother at one end of the pasture, my mom at the other end with a grain bucket or carrots, and the pony would run back and forth. So, when I say we didn’t know much, we really didn’t know much.
The introduction to Fox River Valley Pony Club came pretty quickly, though.
I can say with certainty that it was the Pony Club that saved the pony and us. Pony Club pretty much taught us everything. I mean, I learned how to clean a stall there.
But riding I took to really naturally. I was only five or six when we got Marshmallow. I’d already been skiing and water skiing at that point and I always feel like skiers can ride, riders can ski.
And it was just a lot of fun.
Barrington, Illinois is a very unique and special place. Obviously, the forest preserve there is extraordinary with the trail system maintained by The Riding Club of Barrington Hills. Then there was the Barrington Riding Center, which is owned by the Park District—that was the base of our Pony Club. The Fox River Valley Horse Trials and the Fox River Valley Hunt Kennels were there, so we had exposure to kind of everything.
It was an awesome community to grow up in.
And the Fox River Valley Pony Club had a good membership. It was a strong club and such a fun group of kids. We were just playing around all the time, which I think is weirdly a bit different these days.
My friend Britta and I trail rode all over the forest preserve. We fox hunted together. We pony clubbed. When we weren’t riding our ponies, we were playing horses and cantering around and jumping over things and getting into all sorts of trouble with them.
We also did a lot of really dangerous things. We’d get on my pony double bareback in a halter and lead rope and jump things.
We got good quick because you’re doing a lot of stuff that probably we shouldn’t be doing. I’m the first to say safety is very important. I’m not downplaying it. People should learn how to fall correctly and all that. But it’s like there’s this fear now that I don’t remember as a kid. We had no problem with falling off and climbing back on and staying on better next time.
“It’s like there’s this fear now that I don’t remember as a kid. We had no problem with falling off and climbing back on.”
Now, kids can be on social media and they see other kids in eventing doing different things and they compare themselves. I was just in my bubble. I didn’t know anything else. No one was going south for the winter. We didn’t even really ride in the winter. We mucked about a bit in the snow with the horses and the rest of the time we were skiing.
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In the early days, we rode to Pony Club events—I just remember galloping home back across the field. My first horse show Marshmallow rolled in a giant mud puddle on the ride there. I was in all my clean clothes. White pony too! I mean that’s just what ponies do but I was so destroyed by that.
Then we bought a trailer from another Pony Club family. It must have been a little Quarter Horse size bumper pull and we were pulling it behind my dad’s Bonneville, his company car. I think we might have destroyed that car. One day, we were coming home from some event at the Riding Center and there was this big box on the side of the road. My mom was like, “Oh my god, who would litter on the sides of the roads here?” And it was part of our trailer. The side compartment had fallen off on the way to Pony Club.
It’s funny now, but I’m sure it broke all kinds of rules.
But that’s the thing about Pony Club, we did a little bit of everything. It really encouraged us to be a complete rider in all the disciplines and I became pretty competent at a pretty young age.
And I must have been pretty competitive as a kid because I remember being gutted when they didn’t pick me to be on the know-down team. But I also remember studying my pants off when I did make a know-down team or for the ratings. Britta and I studied to death and did really well at it all.
I liked all that stuff. Even when we didn’t do well.
Like the time Jennifer Rattray and I were on the national dressage team for our region. We were so young and we were probably the best two dressage riders too. I’m sure our Stable Manager turned to the rest of the team and was like, “Oh my God, we got these little kids on the team.” But we had by far the best scores for riding. Well, there was a pool at this venue. Our team said, “Listen, if you get your tack clean and you do a good job, then you can go swimming.” Jennifer and I were so excited that we got into our bathing suits. We were barefoot, cleaning our tack in the tack room when the stable management judges came in—no number, no Pony Club pin, no approved shoes, the whole thing. We got a boatload of stable management deductions for that. Our team probably wanted to murder us!
But there were also real high moments.
At 16, I earned my A rating and it was a huge accomplishment—A is the highest level in Pony Club and I did it catch-riding. My Young Riders’ horse, Harpoon (aka, Bottom Line) was lame that day. They let me carry on with the rating, but I rode other people’s horses. I rode everything I could get my hands on when I was young.
My HA was probably the hardest rating I ever did—there was so much studying!
Pony Club is a bit over the top in making you aware of everything that could go wrong in terms of horse management—like every, little, possible thing. Because you have to respect the heck out of these animals. There were definitely times when I felt like, Oh my God, why does everything have to be so strict and tedious and blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, you really learn in Pony Club.
And the horsemanship sticks with you.
Even today with clients and staff, I’ll tell them, “If you turn a horse out, you have to turn them back into the gate. They have to be facing you. You cannot just go in there and unhook them.” There’s all these weird little Pony Club things that never leave you.
In horses, that education just keeps growing with experience, which I’ve had a lot of at this point in my career.
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It’s been four and a half decades since I was galloping around Barrington with Marshmallow and I’m still so enormously passionate about my sport.
Eventing is a big part of who I am. I feel like I’m only getting good now.
I’m 50 and it’s probably the best I’ve been riding and competing. When you look at the top riders in the world, the Laura Krauts, the Phillip Duttons, most of them are in their 50s or older. And that’s just experience—getting it right and not getting it right and learning when you don’t get it right and carrying on. Things I first learned in Pony Club.
I’ve certainly had heartbreak and a lot of upsets along the way—not getting selected for teams and horses that you just love so very much getting hurt or passing away. All the things that happen in life. But the horse has always been my church. If I’m struggling or I’m having a hard time thinking through something, I get on a horse and I go for a trail ride. That’s where I sort things out.
And I’m still having so much fun.
I just love the partnership with my horses. I hate it when people ask which is your favorite horse because I love every one of my horses so much.
And they’re so different. My little mare, No May Moon, she’s so fantastic and we have such a cool partnership. She’s a spicy mare. And then Vandyke, he’s a big, Irish kind of football-player sort that I’ve been producing since he was five and he hasn’t been the easiest one. He’s a bit tough on the flat, which has made technical cross-country questions sometimes a little hard for him. It’s just really a wonderful feeling to have this horse go cruise around a course like the 4*L at Rebecca Farm and answer all the questions so easily.
It brings me so much joy to know a horse like him. That’s the cool thing, the years and years of training and the struggle that you go through to get to that awesome partnership.
I feel lucky. I feel lucky, for sure.
