Horse Power by Bonnie Bryant Page B

be a good thing Lisa wasn’t set on winning on the second day, because they didn’t.
    “The best part of today was the cross-country jumping,” Stevie said as the team and Kate sat at a booth at TD’s, The Saddle Club’s favorite hangout. It was an ice cream store at the local shopping center. They’d bought themselves sundaes as consolation prizes, since they had come in second to Veronica’s Diamond team.
    “Don’t be too hard on yourselves,” Kate advised them. “You sure looked like you were having fun out there.”
    “Well, we were,” Stevie said. “But winning is more fun.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Kate said.
    For the first time, Carole had the feeling that Katewas ready to reveal some of the problems she had had with riding.
    “How do you mean that?” Carole asked her.
    Kate was quiet for a time, apparently thinking about her answer. The girls and Chad waited with her.
    “I think,” she began hesitantly, “that having fun is more important than winning. I’ve done a lot of winning, riding champion horses. But I think I’ve forgotten how to have fun. I’ve had more fun watching you the last few days than I had riding for a year!”
    “Even when I ended up dumping an entire glass of water on you in the water race?” Stevie asked.
    “Well, I might make an exception there,” Kate admitted with a grin. “But I had an awful lot of fun watching Carole’s pony circle the target so much in pin-the-tail-on-the-pony that she ended up putting her tail on the Spades’ pony!”
    “At least it was a bull’s-eye,” Carole said.
    “Yeah, that the Spades got credit for,” Chad reminded her.
    “Let’s face it, team,” Lisa said. “Today was not our finest hour as riders.”
    “But that’s what I mean,” Kate said. “Sure, you didn’t do as well as you did yesterday, but you were having
fun
! You were cracking up the entire time!”
    “Were they
all
laughing when I fell off Half Dollar trying to reach Veronica’s shadow in shadow tag?” Chad asked.
    “Yeah—but you were laughing, too,” Kate said.“The thing you were all doing—which I had completely forgotten to do—is having
fun
. Red ribbon, blue ribbon, no ribbon at all. What does it really matter as long as you do your best and laugh a little—or a lot, if you can?”
    “But if you kept winning, why weren’t you having fun?” Carole asked her.
    “Because—and I’ve only just realized it—all I cared about was the winning. When you ride in those shows, you see a lot of the same riders almost every week. You have a lot of common interests with them and they become friends—or at least they should. I got to the point where I couldn’t be friends at all. All I cared about was whether I drew a position right after somebody the judges might think was better than I was, or if one of the other riders might get a muddy smudge on her boot so the judge would mark her down. Or sometimes I’d hope for a rainy day. A lot of the other horses didn’t like competing in the rain.” Kate paused for a minute and the full weight of what she’d said seemed to sink in for herself. She scrunched her nose in distaste. “See what I mean? Now that I think about it, it’s no wonder I wasn’t having any fun.”
    Carole spoke first. “When I read about you and met you, all I could think about was how wonderful it must be to be so good!”
    “For some people, maybe,” Kate said. “But it’s like the better I got, the worse
it
got. The
it
was my own attitude.”
    “Maybe the problem isn’t really riding,” Carole said.
    “Oh, yes it is,” Kate corrected her. “Just like I explained.”
    “But don’t you see? It’s not the riding you don’t like—it’s the high-pressure competition. That’s what turned it sour for you.”
    “That’s right,” Stevie piped in, realizing that this was just the chance The Saddle Club needed to convince Kate to start riding again. “If you stop riding, you’re throwing away something you’re