arbara Heine -- who started riding lessons when she was 7 and used her "horse savvy" later to develop Woodside's National Center for Equine Facilitated Therapy -- has won the Outstanding Horseperson-Citizen award given each year by the Mounted Patrol of San Mateo County.
She is being recognized for her work at the center, which uses "hippotherapy" -- a form of physical therapy that a disabled person receives from the movement of a walking horse on which the person is mounted.
Barb, as she's known by friends and colleagues, is flying this week from her native Australia (where she recently returned to live) to Woodside, her home for the past 12 years, to receive the award.
The presentation will take place Friday, February 9, during the Mounted Patrol's 58th annual dinner and installation of officers at the Stanford Faculty Club.
Budd Colby, incoming captain of the Mounted Patrol, says Barb has influenced his life directly.
"Our 11-year-old daughter Charlie has been treated at the NCEFT since she was 4," he said. "One day when a young boy approached her and said, 'You're in a wheelchair, you cannot walk like me,' Charlie answered, 'But I can ride a horse.'"
Thanks to Barb's leadership and that of her predecessor Phoebe Cooke, the Woodside center is now "the largest, full-time hippotherapy program in the United States," says Howard Boone, Mounted Patrol past captain and board member of the therapy center.
Barb's work has been widely recognized in professional journals, instructional books and medical therapy Web sites, Mr. Boone points out.
Born to ride
Born and raised in Melbourne, Barb says her mother got her riding lessons at age 7 as "a desperate move, as I had started to ride horses that I fed and befriended in neighbor's paddocks -- minus saddle and bridle."
She started riding competitively soon after on her first pony, Lucky, and won more than 2,000 ribbons during a span of 20 years in dressage, one-day eventing, and show jumping.
She began teaching youngsters to ride when she was 14 as part of her Pony Club activities, and broke and trained her first horse at age 16. Later, she went on to become chief instructor and examiner for the Pony Club Association of South Australia.
During her last year at the University of Melbourne, where she majored in physiotherapy, she met and married John Heine. The couple raised three children on their sheep farm. In 1975, she broke her spine from a bad fall, which cut back her competitive activities through the 1980s.
But the injury didn't stop her from continuing to train riders and horses from novice to advanced levels in dressage and eventing, some of whom went on to compete at the Olympic level in three-day eventing.
When her husband moved his business to Menlo Park in 1988, she found that without a job and no children at home she was lonely; but not for long. She bought two 4-year-old thoroughbreds from the Bay Meadows race track and spent two wonderful years, she said, training them, making new friends, and discovering the magical trail system of Woodside.
Barb also discovered the National Center for Equine Facilitated Therapy when she responded to an ad in the Country Almanac. In 1990 she began volunteering there four hours a week, and continued as a volunteer until last November, devoting 60 hours a week to the program in recent years. Besides being president and executive director, she was the director of physical therapy, volunteer coordinator, and the main horse trainer and fundraiser.
Barb is one of only 18 certified clinical specialists in hippotherapy in the United States. In 1998, she was president of the American Hippotherapy Association.
"We are grateful for the lasting contributions Barb Heine has made to our community, devoting untold hours purely as a volunteer and with the attitude that her students' successes were her successes, always evidenced by big smiles from everyone," said Stu Whittelsey, NCEFT board member and Mounted Patrol past captain.
