SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — Erinn Higgins is a racetracker, and this is home. She is the daughter of a thoroughbred trainer and an exercise rider. Her childhood memories are of being lifted onto a pony on the backside of this historic racetrack and playing touch football outside the barn of the Hall of Fame trainer Allen Jerkens, who died in March.
Higgins’s mother, Cheryl Decker, introduced her to show horses in the hopes that her daughter would find a way to appreciate the animals away from the racetrack.
Her father, Bill Higgins, loved nothing better than having Erinn alongside him each summer as they cared for the horses in Jerkens’s barn.