“A perfect day with the horses is just competing and doing
well,” Elizabeth Brumbaugh-Quirk said. Elizabeth is a very
busy young professional. She’s still competing in cutting
horse events, designing and curating her own furniture
collection, trying to put her family’s house back together
after a raging flood, planning her company’s presence at
the upcoming National Cutting Horse Association Futurity
and planning for an addition to her family.
Elizabeth has a long history with the NCHA. She first
started riding cutting horses in 2001 at the age of 12. “I
went to the first annual Whitney Welch cutting horse
camp at Silverado. I started competing about a year after
that,” she said. She hauled for the Youth World in 2007
and won the competition and was the reigning Senior
Youth World Champion that year and also served as the
Youth President of the NCHA. She then took some time
off to attend both undergraduate and graduate school at
Texas A&M.
It was during graduate school that she and then-friend
– now-husband, Todd Quirk – started dating. They had
been friends for years competing against each other at
cutting horse events. The couple married in 2012. They
continue to compete against each other but neither is
keeping score on who has the most wins. “We are both
non-professionals and we continue to compete against
each other. It doesn’t really matter so we both want each
other to win a lot of money. That’s all that matters now,”
she said.
The couple split their time and their horses between
their home in Denham Springs, La., and North Texas.
Their home close to Baton Rouge was one of the many
devastated by flooding in August of this year. Most of
the homes in their town of 10,000 were flooded and the
devastation is described as being everywhere with up
to 70 percent of the homes taking in water. She and her
husband have had to take their home down to the studs
and begin rebuilding all from a trailer parked behind the
house. But according to Elizabeth, “There’s a lot of people
in our community that got it a lot worse than we did.”
Luckily she has some experience with interior design
and furnishings, working in her parents’ 50-year-old
furniture retail store, Brumbaugh’s Fine Home Furnishings located on I-30 at the Linkcrest Drive exit just on the
eastern edge of Aledo. Right out of school she worked
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