Covid Can’t Keep Emerald M Ranch From Its Work

Lisa Michelangelo (left) with Brianna at the recent Derby Day celebration at the Hyatt Place Hotel in Wesley Chapel. (Photo courtesy of Lisa Michelangelo)

When Brianna, a Wesley Chapel teenager with Cerebral Palsy, graduated from high school in 2019, she could have rolled herself across the stage in the wheelchair she has been confined to for most of her life.

Instead, she walked.

For Lisa Michelangelo, who had helped make that miracle possible at her Emerald M Therapeutic Riding Center in Brooksville, it was the type of moment she lives for and why she does what she does.

“It was really one of the most awesome things I’ve seen,” Michelangelo says.

Michelangelo, formerly a physical therapist in New Tampa, founded the Emerald M ranch six years ago. Named for the stone that Michelangelo says stands for “hope, renewal and growth,” Emerald M offers physical therapy that incorporates hippotherapy, which utilizes the movement of horses for rehabilitative purposes.

It has been a godsend for many like Brianna. It was the first time any of her Center Academy classmates had ever seen Brianna walk. Thanks to the therapy she received at the Emerald M Therapeutic Riding Center, Brianna made her graduation one of the most memorable days of her life — and the same can be said about many of those in attendance.

“I can’t express how much doing this has changed my whole perspective,” Brianna said in a video that played at the Emerald M’s second annual Derby Day fund raiser earlier this month at the Hyatt Place Hotel in Wesley Chapel. “It’s definitely life changing. I believe that wholeheartedly. It was one of the best decisions me and my family ever made.”

The fund raiser, like Brianna’s graduation, was a hit. It raised more than  $20,000 to help the Emerald M ranch continue to provide its unique form of therapy.

Usually held on the same day as the Kentucky Derby in May, the fund raiser almost didn’t happen this year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We were planning and then stopped planning and then started planning again,” says Michelangelo. “It was a real blessing to be able to do it.” 

The event was limited to 120 people, or half of capacity, and about 100 attended. Those not ready to venture out or concerned about the size of the crowd despite a host of coronavirus precautions taken by the hotel’s staff, the event also was streamed to provide a virtual experience.  

Because most of Emerald M’s participants are more susceptible to coronavirus, the 20-acre ranch had to shut down in March, and re-opened in June. It features 10 horses, and more than a dozen volunteers.

The center, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, usually hosts two fund raisers a year — the Derby Day event in May, which was moved to September 5, and a gala dinner in October, which had to be cancelled.

“Derby Day did not offset the gala, but we did benefit with twice what we raised at Derby Day last year,” Michelangelo says. “That is tremendous. It puts us in a much better place moving forward.”

Source: EmeraldMTherapeuticRidingCenter.org

According to Michelangelo, hippotherapy, or equine-assisted therapy, is a growing and effective way to improve one’s coordination, balance and strength, especially in cases with children suffering from Cerebral Palsy.

According to the American Hippotherapy Association, Inc., and others, the horse’s pelvis and hips move in the same way as a human’s. By riding on a horse and maintaining balance, sometimes even riding sideways and even by sitting backwards, the movement of the horse is channeled to the brain and can enhance neuromuscular development.

Not only does it help build things like strength and control, it has various sensory benefits and also helps improve motor skills.

Sarah Clanton spent the first five years of her life with nothing. She existed chained to a bed in the Ukraine, and when she was adopted by Yvonne and her husband Jon Clanton, she could barely sit up by herself.

Sarah is one of the Emerald M Therapeutic Riding Center’s most successful patients, who despite being blind and mentally underdeveloped, is now walking with assistance and responding to instructions and showing major improvement in her motor skills, thanks to hippotherapy.

Emerald M has participants who suffer from autism, processing disorders, emotional disorders, cerebral palsy, paralysis and brain tumors. It also offers beginner horseback riding lessons for siblings of program participants, which helps keep everyone in the family involved.

The center also offers therapeutic adaptive riding, which is more recreational and teaches someone with a disability horsemanship skills and how to ride.

Regardless of the help needed, Michelangelo says there’s a good chance they can provide it at Emerald M.

“I love what I do,” Michelangelo says. “It doesn’t feel like therapy. We’re out in a recreational environment, and once the kids get on the horses, I’m golden because they don’t ever want to get off.”

Emerald M Riding Center is located at 4022 Goldsmith Rd. in Brooksville. For more information or to donate, visit EmeraldMTherapeuticRidingCenter.org, or call (352)-244-7471. 

Water Park for The Grove?

A potential water park at The Grove in Wesley Chapel would be similar to something like Splash Harbour Water Park in Indian Rocks Beach..

Jamie Hess hadn’t even opened his dueling piano bar, Treble Makers, before he was on to the next thing.

A water park for The Grove?

“I get bored easily,” Hess jokes.

According to Hess, he was having a conversation with Gold only about a month back when the developer asked what he thought about the idea of a water park, which could be built on 1.8 acres next to the Chuck E. Cheese’s.

I thought it was absolutely brilliant,” Hess said, who went ahead and jumped in as the point man on the project. He signed a letter of intent that day.

Hess says it wasn’t hard to convince him. After all, he was the first person to sign a lease with Gold. (Note – Double Branch Artisanal Ales had actually signed with the previous owners shortly before Gold bought the property.)

“I think his vision for this area is great,” Hess says. “I wanted to be a part of it right from the beginning.”

The water park will not be sprawling like Tampa’s Adventure Island, but will be family-oriented, says Gold, and small enough where parents will have no trouble keeping an eye on their kids.

Hess says he envisions the park as something similar to Splash Harbour Water Park in Indian Rocks Beach, but larger — Splash Harbour is on roughly 1.3 acres, compared to the 1.8 acres planned for The Grove’s water park.

The Grove park will have a lazy river and a variety of slides and splash zones. It won’t need a mini-golf course like Splash Harbour, because Gold is building a standalone course as part of his theater complex.

The water park will have season passes, as well as one-day and four-hour passes. Although it is still very early in development, a one-day pass might cost $25, with a four-hour pass running $16. Season passes will be “very very reasonable” according to Hess.

He adds that he is in the feasibility phase and, once that is determined, the design phase begins, followed by permitting.

Within a year, Hess says, the park could be ready and he has already shown the county pictures of what he has planned and, “they were enthusiastic.” 

COMEDY GOLD!

There’s already a taproom, dueling piano bar and mini-golf, and a unique movie theater and a container park are on the way to The Grove. But, if you think developer Mark Gold of Mishorim Gold is done, it looks like the joke might be on you!

Side Splitters Comedy Club will be bringing the same nationally-known comics. like America’s Got Talent finalist Preacher Lawson, to its Wesley Chapel location that it regularly schedules in Tampa.

Two guys walk into a bar.

One guy says, “Hey, how would you like to bring your comedy club to The Grove theater in Wesley Chapel?”

The other guy says, “Hey yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Let’s do it!”

Okay, so that’s not much of a joke — we’ll leave that to the pros, who will be headed to Wesley Chapel in a few months, when the renowned Side Splitters Comedy Club opens a its second location in The Grove on S.R. 54.

Developer Mark Gold, who is redeveloping The Grove into an entertainment space unrivaled in the area, says he has forged a deal with Brian Thompson, the owner of Side Splitters in Carrollwood, to bring a full-fledged stand-up comedy club to the area before the end of 2020.

As part of the former Cobb theater’s dramatic makeover — which already is set to include a huge video game area, a high-tech spin room, theaters that cater to kids and moviegoers and two new restaurants — Side Splitters Comedy Club will take over one of the theaters for its stand-up shows.

“We have gotten a ton of requests to get another location and Wesley Chapel is one of the areas with the most requests,” says Thompson. “We know it’s a growing area and, when the opportunity came up to get in there, we took it. We see it as a win-win for both of us.”

And, for the record, Gold and Thompson didn’t forge the deal at a bar. Instead, Thompson, who says he has been unofficially scouting the Wesley Chapel area for years, came across a 3-D video online showing the new things happening at The Grove and inquired about any vacancies.

He was told one unit was available, but it was smaller than what he was looking for, so he declined.

However, five minutes later, after Gold found out a comedy club had called — just what he had been looking for — the developer arranged to meet with Thompson that same day.

“He said he was one of the top comedy clubs in the U.S.,” Gold says. “I had a theater available in what will be an entertainment complex. It’s perfect. It’s a good fit.”

April Macie has performed at Side Splitters Comedy Club, as well as on Netflix.

While the original Side Splitters is a 5,500-sq.-ft. location and seats 250 patrons at tables and chairs below the stage, the comedy theater at The Grove will seat roughly 170 above the stage, with food and drink service.

“It will be a little different, but it will be the same intimate feel of Side Splitters that people dig,” says Thompson met with Gold’s management company this past week to hammer out the details.

Thompson, who was the general manager at Side Splitters since 2007 before buying the club in 2019, says it draws 70,000-80,000 people a year while mostly holding shows Thursdays through Sundays. That built-in audience is likely to translate nicely to the Wesley Chapel location, which also happens to be the home of some of Side Splitters’ more popular comics, like Rahn Hortman and JB Ball.

Side Splitters Carrollwood has hosted a number of nationally-known comics, and Thompson says some of those big names also will come to Wesley Chapel.

“We’ll definitely get comedians with some strong TV credits — some late night appearances, “America’s Got Talent,” “Last Comic Standing” — people like that,” Thompson says.  

Open mic nights also are popular at the club and will carry over to The Grove.

“It’s a nice partnership,” Thompson says. “Mark’s vision is having a one-stop shop, where people can walk around, grab dinner, play a round of golf and see a comedy show, without having to get in their cars to drive to each place. We’re very very excited to be part of that.” 

Zooming Through An Awesome Community Meeting On Racism

So, I certainly didn’t know what to expect when 21 people got together for the first-ever New Tampa and Wesley Chapel Zoom community meeting on racism on August 25, but I have to say that it was shocking, eye-opening, disheartening and heartwarming all at the same time.

How could it possibly have been all of those things at once? 

It was shocking because, from my meeting co-host — District 63 State Rep. Fentrice Driskell — to military veteran April Lewis to my friend Nikii Lewis (all shown on this page), some of the stories told by the black and white people alike who participated in that meeting showed just how prevalent dealing with racism in our area and this country truly is and seemingly always has been.

It was shocking for me to hear that Rep. Driskell, a Harvard University and Georgetown Law-educated Tampa-based attorney originally from Polk County, has been assumed to be either the court reporter or the client/defendant as often as she has been assumed to be the lawyer.

It was eye-opening to hear Nikii, who lives in a mostly white neighborhood in Wesley Chapel, tell the story about her six-year-old daughter, who told her — at age 3 — that she’s afraid of white people, and that when her daughter was drawing pictures of people, she wouldn’t use a brown crayon because, she said,  she wanted the people “to look normal.”

And, it was disheartening to hear that April Lewis, a recent transplant to New Tampa who is suffering from PTSD after six years in the Army with two deployments, who also is a Gold Star wife whose husband was killed in Iraq, doesn’t feel safe when she walks into a store and doesn’t feel the same equality as I do.

But, the Zoom meeting also was heartwarming because several of the attendees who were white said that they were participating because they felt the need to do something in the wake of the recent shootings of black people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake and others by law enforcement officials and the civil unrest that has followed those incidents across this country.

When I organized the event I didn’t know what my goal was — and I still don’t — but I do know that I truly do not want it to stop there.    

“I can’t even tell you how many times, as an attorney in court, that people have assumed that I was the court reporter or the defendant.” — State Representative Fentrice Driskell

“If my black skin is good enough to fight for this country, I can’t understand why my blackness isn’t good enough to receive the same equality as everyone else.” — New Tampa resident & Gold Star wife April Lewis.

“In one of the neighborhoods where Ronnell grew up in Tampa, there was an elementary school called Robert E. Lee Elementary, and that was just considered a normal thing. And, for too long, it was considered taboo to even talk about racism, so meetings like this are definitely a step in the right direction.” — Live Oak residents Ronnell & Brittaney Curtis

“When the George Floyd incident originally started, there were people in our own neighborhood patrolling in golf carts and (carrying) guns, which was kind of concerning to us.” — Wesley Chapel residents Sara & Kyle Hill

“My son is half Hispanic and it was only recently he told us he was discriminated against in school. When I asked why he never told us, he said he didn’t think my wife and I would believe him.” — New Tampa hotel owner David Larson

“I was working as a prosecutor in Pasco County and got pulled over by a cop because prosecutors have their plates blocked out. He didn’t believe I was a prosecutor until he called one of my associates he knew who told him I was.” — Attorney & Wesley Chapel resident Cornelius Demps

“I grew up in a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania and we had no black people in our town. I remember we had a community pool and we were going to have a swim meet at the pool , but people in the town were concerned that something bad would happen if black people from other communities would be swimming in the pool. I wasn’t raised that way and I remember being shocked that anyone would think something like that.” — New Tampa resident Donna Harwood

“I worked as a speech language pathologist in the Pasco elementary schools and I am learning a lot about racial injustice in this country. I would like to do something about helping to change that situation, but I realize that (as a white person) I can’t lead that but I am here to learn and follow..” — New Tampa resident Naomi Lang-Unnasch.

LIFE IN THE BUBBLE

Candice Dupree pushes her 3-year-old twins Cali and Demi on swings near their home in The Ridge at Wiregrass Ranch.

Her 15th WNBA season is over for former Wharton High star Candice Dupree, and while she wishes her summer also included the WNBA playoffs, she says she couldn’t be happier. 

It was time to head home to be reunited with her three-year-old twins, Cali and Demi.

“I told my mom, whenever that last game is, I need you here the next morning to get me out of here,” Dupree said from Bradenton, where she wrapped up the season with her Indiana Fever teammates in the WNBA bubble at the IMG Academy on Sept. 12. “I want to get home.”

Home is Wesley Chapel, just up the road from Wharton, where Dupree remains the school’s all-time leading scorer.

Today, she says, her greatest accomplishments are raising the twins with wife DeWanna Bonner, a job she is eager to resume full time.

Photo by Ned Dishman/NBAE via Getty Images

Because Dupree and Bonner are both WNBA players, it is often no easy task. They play for different teams, have different schedules and because most women’s basketball players make more money playing overseas — before coronavirus and this summer’s WNBA season, Dupree was playing in Hungary, DeWanna in China — they have a hectic travel schedule and few days off.

While some WNBA players brought their children into the bubble — basically an isolation zone to keep the players coronavirus-free so the season could be played — Dupree was able to rely on mom Patty and Dupree’s twin sister Crystal, who she jokes enlisted as the nanny the day Bonner gave birth to the twins.

“We didn’t really know what we’d be getting ourselves into inside the bubble,” Dupree says. “At home, they have school, they play outside and in the pool. They wouldn’t have been able to do that (in Bradenton).”

The bubble was an experience Dupree says she won’t forget. She was playing in Hungary when President Donald Trump enacted a travel ban from Europe because of coronavirus, and, the very next day, she was hustling to get back to Florida. 

Photo by Ned Dishman/NBAE via Getty Images

When she entered the bubble in June for the WNBA’s 22-game schedule, the league was at the forefront of the social justice movement (photo on next page) in the wake of the death of George Floyd and nationwide protests. 

Dupree was active in the league’s initiatives and personally met with the League of Women Voters in hopes of becoming more involved with the voting community.

With the season over, Dupree is eager to spend time with the girls. 

“My girls are to the point where, when we talk, they are like, “Momma, come home, when are you coming home?,” Dupree says. “Initially, they were not like that. But, they are starting to miss their parents.”

Dupree is not looking to return to Europe to play hoops anytime soon and, at the age of 36, her WNBA career is finally winding down.

She will be a free agent. Her stats this year were in line with her career numbers of 14.4 points and 6.6 rebounds a game, and she is in great shape physically. She could play another two years, she says.

“But if a different job opportunity comes my way, I wouldn’t hesitate to take it,” she added. Opportunities she is interested in exploring include coaching at the professional level.

Do You Remember When…

Dupree was a silky smooth forward for the Wildcats, becoming the school’s all-time leading scorer and winning the Dottie McGahagin Award as Hillsborough County’s best girls player in 2001-02 (to go with a 4.8 GPA). She went on to be an All-American at Temple University, playing for three-time Olympic gold medalist Dawn Staley, and was the No. 6 pick by Chicago in the WNBA draft in 2006.

One thing she never imagined while making buckets at Wharton is that she would one day be where she is today — a 15-year WNBA veteran, a seven-time All-Star, a 2014 WNBA champion and one of the best players the women’s league has ever seen. 

“I never wanted to play in WNBA,” Dupree says. “I’m not going to lie. I didn’t even know what it was. I was so busy competing in so many different sports I never even watched pro sports on TV. I was just excited to be recruited and get a full ride somewhere.”

While it has been her consistency and steadiness that has defined her — she has never averaged less than double figures in points — Dupree is fifth all-time in WNBA career scoring, having put up more points than women’s basketball legends like Lisa Leslie, Sue Bird and Tina Charles.

In fact, for someone who never imagined playing professionally, Dupree is all over the WNBA career record book: second behind all-time leading scorer Diana Taurasi in field goals made, fourth in minutes played, and seventh in rebounding and games played.

In 2010, she put together one of the best WNBA seasons ever, averaging 15.7 points, 7.6 rebounds, shooting a blistering (and league-leading) 66.4 percent from the floor, and was second from the free throw line at 93.6 percent.

“I put together a pretty good resume,” Dupree says. “I’m on some lists with some very elite company. At some point, when I have I have time to sit back and reflect, I’ll say that was one helluva career. But, right now, I’m still wrapped up in it, playing and trying to win games, so I don’t pay it too much attention.”

Now that she’s home, Dupree plans to relax. She may check out the new Wiregrass Sports Campus of Pasco County near her home in The Ridge at Wiregrass, which recently hosted the seventh annual Candice Dupree Invitational, a girls basketball tournament for college hoops hopefuls. Dupree has sponsored teams for the tournament organizers, the East Tampa Youth Basketball Association, for years by buying them shoes and uniforms.

“It sounds great, we’ve needed something like that in that area for years,” Dupree says. She says one of her daughters may be interesting in the Sports Campus’ cheerleading program; the other, she laughs, leans more towards playing football.

And while she takes her kids on walks and plays with them in the pool, she’ll contemplate her next move.

“I’m not really in a rush,” Dupree admits. “I usually leave for Europe after Christmas but who knows if that will be happening. I just want to spend time with the girls and hang out for the time being. Then, we’ll see what happens.”