More than horsing around at Rebecca Farm

Sarah Broussard didn’t follow her mom into the family business.

“Actually, it was the other way around,” she said.

The equestrian competitor turned event organizer has filled her mother’s shoes, though, continuing a family tradition and turning a lifelong passion for horses into the largest single-event economic driver in the Flathead Valley, according to a study released in December.

The show returns Thursday when the 15th annual iteration of The Event at Rebecca Farm kicks off. The eventing competition is the largest of its kind in the United States.

“When I was young, my mother made the mistake of taking a young girl to the barn with her and I fell in love with horses very quickly,” Broussard said. “I got a taste of it when I was about nine and dabbled in it a little bit, and when I was 15 I made the hundred-percent jump into the eventing world.”

Eventing, or the equestrian triathlon, is a three-discipline horse riding competition that combines dressage, cross-country and show jumping, and The Event at Rebecca Farm features a CCI three-star division cross-country course, the second-highest rating available.

The seeds of eventing in Kalispell and the Broussard family were planted in the mid-1980s when Sarah’s late mother, Rebecca, became involved in organizing competitions at Herron Park. Sarah participated in some of those early events and, after returning home to the family farm after college, began working alongside her mother to host at Rebecca Farm. When Rebecca passed away in 2010, her daughter took over as organizer.

Today, The Event is hardly just an equestrian competition. It features the Rebecca Farm to Market 5K run, a trade fair with more than 100 vendors, a kids play area, food court and more.

“I think that people think sometimes, ‘oh, it’s just a horse show. There’s all of these horsey people doing their horsey things,’” Broussard said. “But Rebecca Farm is a lot more. It’s about a lot more than just horses.

“It’s hard to get anyone, even horse people, to come and watch an event for hours on end and that’s it,” she continued. “We’re lucky here. We get to highlight a lot of local artisans, local craftsmen. When you go to the trade fair here, it’s not all horsey stuff.”

A study released in December by the University of Montana’s Institute of Tourism and Recreation Research estimated that The Event contributed $4.4 million dollars to the local economy in 2015. The Event drew 10,000 spectators a year ago and brings in about 600 competitors from around the world each year.

The competition’s growth, according to Broussard, can be attributed at least in part to flipping one of the largest drawbacks of traveling to Kalispell on its head.

“When I go elsewhere and I try and drum up competitors and get people to come, I really champion the Flathead Valley and the one thing I always get is ‘wow, it’s so far away,’” Broussard said. “And yeah, it is far away. We live in a very remote part of the United States and this is not a stop along the way, this is definitely a destination event.

“A lot of people now come a week early and they take in a lot of what the Valley has to offer. These people come here and it’s an onslaught of 600 tourists plus all the people they are with.

“People come here and they’re like, ‘Wow, this place is really nice,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, aren’t you glad you did?’”

Broussard was a talented rider in her own right in her youth, competing in eventing and, later, in polo. She gave up competing at the highest levels in part after what she called a “pretty severe accident” and turned her attention instead to caring for her young family and working as an event organizer.

She was hooked on the sport by the adrenaline rush that came from riding, specifically, in the cross-country portion of the competition, and Broussard still does occasionally pop up as a competitive rider, including at an event in May in Spokane.

And she has certainly not lost the love of horses that was sparked in that barn with her mother as a child.

“The horse that I’m riding (in Spokane), he came from the show jump world and I don’t think he had ever been out in a field galloping and jumping,” Broussard said. “And he thinks that it is the most fun thing ever.

“Whenever he’s out, when I go schooling,” she continued before pausing.

“I know that he can’t really smile but he has a huge smile on his face and he’s very excited to be out there.”

Broussard’s two children, ages 10 and 12, don’t compete in eventing, but her 12-year-old daughter does ride horses and the pair got their first taste of the family business a year ago.

“Last year, they started a lemonade stand and so they had their lemonade stand they ended up donating, I think it was, $414 to Halt Cancer at X (an initiative started by Broussard to raise money for breast cancer research),” she said.

“They were pretty proud of that.”

The Event is free to attend and begins Thursday at 8 a.m. The first event in the top (CCI3*) division is dressage on Friday at 3:30 p.m. The CCI3* competition continues Saturday in cross-country and concludes Sunday with show jumping. A full schedule is available at www.rebeccafarm.org.

Rebecca Farm is located at 1385 Farm to Market Road in Kalispell.