On a weekend when the Internet was taking interstate communications to a level never seen before in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it was somehow fitting that the Internet brought together the four members of Team Tilt, winners of the novice division at The Chronicle of the Horse/USEA Adult Team Challenge.

The Kentucky Classic Horse Trials, at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, hosted the first of the year’s three Adult Team Challenges, on Sept. 2-4.

The team members–D.C. McBroom, Robby Johnson, Lisa De Hart and Leslie Granger–live in three different U.S. Eventing Association areas, although they were listed as Area IV, Granger’s area since she lives in Wildwood, Mo. McBroom and De Hart live in southwestern Virginia, while Johnson lives in Little Rock, Ark. McBroom and De Hart got to know their teammates through chat groups, primarily from the Chronicle’s bulletin board.

And they started assembling their team, and concocting their team name, last September at the American Eventing Championships, where McBroom and De Hart competed and Johnson was a volunteer. The name was mostly Johnson’s creation, from the song “Tilt Ya Head Back,” by Nelly and Christina Aguilera.

“Oh, we’ve been planning this all year,” said Johnson, who handles public relations for a health-care company. He arranged for their embroidered polo shirts, hats, message bags and saddle pads, all in beige with blue lettering.

Perhaps the team outfits made the difference. Team Tilt grabbed the lead in dressage and held off Kick On from Area IV by 9.5 points. McBroom, De Hart and Johnson each finished second in their respective individual divisions, adding nothing to their dressage scores.

Granger bred both her horse, a Paint named Black Diamond Run, and Woodbine, the horse McBroom had planned to ride on this team. In fact, they’re true half-brothers. But Woodbine was badly injured while falling during the show jumping warm-up at the Virginia Horse Trials in May (as was McBroom) and
hasn’t fully recovered. So McBroom switched Due South from the training level team on which she’d planned to ride him.

Black Diamond Run hadn’t started since straining a suspensory ligament at an event in June, and he was penalized for one refusal at the water jump.

This was the sixth ATC start for Granger, 46, and her third team victory. She rode “Maurice’s” dam, Fifth Avenue, at her first ATC, in 1991. She’s a mechanical engineer and the director of engineering for a defense contractor in St. Louis, as well as the program manager for the upgrade to the Minuteman missile.

McBroom, 43, has now ridden on five winning ATC teams at novice and training levels, from nine total teams. She’s the former Area II chairman, and she’s a member of the Save the Classic Three-Day Task Force, as is Johnson.

Due South is a 14-year-old Thoroughbred who never raced. McBroom thinks that’s because he was caught in a barn fire as a youngster, where she believes he fractured his skull and got the prominent scar on his left hip.

“He was about foot-perfect. All in all, it was one of those magical weekends that you wish would never end,” she said.

De Hart is a good friend of McBroom’s, living in Childress, Va., not far from McBroom’s home in Floyd, Va. A friend of De Hart’s bred The Ozzy Philosophy, an appendix Quarter Horse, and she bought him as a baby. “Ozzy,” 6, competed at training level last year, but De Hart hadn’t been able to start him this year prior to the ATC since she’s gone back to school to pursue a second career.

De Hart, 32, is working on a degree in school psychology at Radford University (Va.) after spending eight years working for an advertising agency in Washington, D.C. She has two years of school left to go.

“I realized that I didn’t really like advertising and that it’s not really as important as everybody thinks it is,” said De Hart.

Johnson has trained Rhodes Point, 8, ever since friend Heather Bailey (who rode on the Area II training level team for which McBroom had planned to ride) found him for Johnson at Penn National Racecourse (Pa.). “Rhodey” made 34 lifetime starts, including 22 starts in 2001, and Johnson hadn’t seen him before he got off the van in Little Rock in March 2002.

“I was so nervous for the team going into show jumping that I didn’t even think about my individual placing,” said Johnson.

He also had Hurricane Katrina on his mind, as he’s a native of the Deep South. His cousin lives in New Orleans (with his wife and children) and had been evacuated to Atlanta, but no one was able to get in touch with his sister’s mother-in-law in Biloxi, Miss., for four days. “With everything else going on in the world, it was really nice to have the camaraderie of the team this weekend,” said Johnson.

TV-Friendly

The three members of the victorious preliminary team, called Area VIII Fear Factor, are also eager Chronicle bulletin boarders, but that’s not how they met. Morley Thompson and Shannon Risner each live in Loveland, Ohio. Annike Kramer lives in Chelsea, Mich., but she’s ridden with the dynamic Area VIII adult riders program for years, and Risner has been the chairman for the last year.

The Area VIII program has about 130 members, and they sent nine teams to the ATC. This year they used a TV-show theme to name the teams–Survivor, Trading Spouses and Pimp My Ride were some other choices.

Mark Combs has coached the Area VIII crew for six years, and he and his wife, Mimi, have played a central role in helping Risner, 35, and her horse, Rudy, progress. She bought the Thoroughbred six years ago and has worked hard to overcome his confidence issues. After “a dismal season,” Mimi rode Rudy at the Virginia Horse Trials in 2001 (while Risner rode another horse in the ATC there) and was eliminated on cross-country.

But Mimi told Risner “to stick with him, that he was just a perfectionist.” This was Risner’s second ATC start with Rudy–they were on the second-placed team at training level in 2003.

Risner is the office manager of FL Emmert, a company that manufactures brewer’s yeast for pet food and supplements.

Kramer has had to overcome even more serious physical problems with Cat Burglar, a Thoroughbred she too found at the track. He has an immune-system disorder that’s caused him to spend months at veterinary clinics in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. But he’s been OK for a year, since he started on an antibiotic called chlorophenol, potent stuff that kills skin bacteria and is basically toxic to humans.

Kramer, 43, didn’t start riding until she was 37, after raising four children, now between the ages of 25 and 12. The ATC was her fifth preliminary start, and the first one in which she finished under the optimum time.

Thompson, 49, and Stoney Brook, a gray Thoroughbred-Percheron cross, have been competing at preliminary for four years and were on the second-placed team at the 2003 ATC. Thompson works for a textile company in Cincinnati and is a jt.-MFH of the Camargo Hunt. He planned to take Stoney Brook, 10, cubbing on Labor Day, the day after the ATC.

“People ask me if I hunt my event horse, but I tell them that I event my hunting horse,” he said with a smile.

Thompson grew up hunting with Camargo and was a member of the Miami Valley Pony Club, but he didn’t compete for 20 years because of work and not having a horse, until he bought Stoney Brook, five years ago.

“Bitch Pack” Hunts DownThe Training Title

Thompson wasn’t the only dedicated foxhunter to leave Lexington with a scrim sheet from the Chronicle. Jill Wagenknecht, who rode on the victorious training level team, is a jt.-MFH with the Bridlespur Hunt near St. Louis. Her teammate Maria Brazil also hunts with Bridlespur, as does Leslie Granger of the winning novice team. And teammate Kathy Viele is a whipper-in with Ft. Leavenworth (Kan.) and also follows Mission Valley (Kan.).

The training level winners even called themselves the Area IV Training Bitch Pack, and they had to come from behind in show jumping to nip the Area III Southern Storm team by 1.3 points.

The Bitch Pack grabbed the early dressage lead, but Wagenknecht, who won her division’s dressage on Lord Yac, had a cross-country refusal, and Amanda Teague, on Princess Grayce, was eliminated for going off course. She’d arrived at the KHP late on Friday and only gotten to walk the course once.

For Wagenknecht, 43, a refusal at the red-roofed house beside the Head of the Lake was a big improvement over the fall she had at the same fence in May, a crash that sent her to the hospital. This time, she said, “Apparently I was still having some issues with it, because I took too many tugs.”

Wagenknecht was the MFH and huntsman of the Meramec Valley Hunt before it merged with Bridlespur in 2001.

She and Brazil were also teammates on the triumphant preliminary team at the 2004 Central ATC. “I start all my event horses foxhunting, and [Gadget de Brumes] is a fabulous foxhunter,” said Brazil, an anesthesiologist who substitutes for other anesthesiologists in several states. She spent 18 months at the Fauquier Hospital in Warrenton, Va., a few years ago, and that’s how she met Karen O’Connor, who is competing her horse Bon Chance.

Brazil, 49, has also worked extensively with trainer Julie Ulrich, who’s lived in France for about 15 years. Ulrich found “Gadget” and Bon Chance there for Brazil.

And it was Teague, 48, who started Bon Chance, and others, as young horses for Brazil. Kentucky was the first training start for Teague’s horse Princess Grayce, a 7-year-old, Arabian-Trakehner mare. She lives in Defiance, Mo., and specializes in starting young horses.

Viele, of Easton, Kan., started Connery, 8, too, because she bred him. His dam is a Thoroughbred, and his sire is the Holsteiner stallion Cimarron. She also whips in with Connery at Fort Leavenworth.

“We call him ‘the squeal toy’ because he’s very vocal about everything he does. He squeals when he leaves the starting box, or jumps a big fence, or when he thinks you’re making him work too hard,” said Viele, 41, the rights director for a book-publishing company.

Connery made his preliminary debut at Wayne Horse Trials (Ill.) in July, with Viele’s sister-in-law Becky Holder, whom she introduced to her brother. Viele met her own husband, Steve, 14 years ago at a Fort Leaven-worth-Mission Valley joint meet. Steve’s a U.S. Army reservist, now stationed in Germany.