How Horse Shows Still Set Parkland's Sunday Schedule

Drive to the corner of 84th Avenue and Holmberg Road on the wrong Sunday and the gate at 8350 Ranch Road will be locked and quiet. Drive there on the right Sunday between November and April and the same gravel lot holds a farmers market with tables of herbs and honey. Drive there on a different right Sunday when the PHA has a show scheduled, and it holds a dressage show with trailers backed up to the rail. Same address. Same two open rings and covered pavilion. Two entirely different calendars running through the same acreage, and right now, in mid-September, the market side of that calendar is dark.

This is the Equestrian Center at Temple Park, and it is not a themed amenity someone bolted onto a subdivision. It is the oldest park the city has.

The City's First Park Was Never Meant to Be Ordinary

The story locals tell about Parkland Day usually starts in 1967, when Betty Bell, a local artist and two-term commissioner, held a horse show on her own two and a half acre property along Trotters Lane near 87th Avenue. Two years later Harold Bockhold moved the event to his ten acre property in the Ranches, and by 1973, as Parkland's mayor, he secured the corner of 84th Avenue and Holmberg Road for the city. That land became Parkland's first public park, and it is the same ground now known as the Equestrian Center at Temple Park.

What makes this worth knowing is not the trivia. It is what happened next. As Parkland filled in around that original parcel with subdivisions and gated communities, the ring and pavilion at Temple Park never got repurposed into ball fields or a splash pad. The city's annual birthday celebration eventually outgrew it. This spring's 63rd anniversary parade route ran along Pine Island Road and Nob Hill Road, finishing at Pine Trails Park, where the amphitheater now hosts the crowds, the business expo, and the evening concert. Temple Park kept doing what it was built for. The party moved a few miles east. The horses stayed put.

Two Calendars Share One Parking Lot

Anyone who has shown up at the Equestrian Center expecting one thing and found another has run into the fact that two separate organizations run two separate schedules on the same ground.

The Parkland Farmers' Market operates Sundays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., but only across a November through April season. This year's market returns November 1, 2026, and closes again in the spring. Outside that window, the lot belongs entirely to the Parkland Horseman's Association, a nonprofit that has run monthly dressage, hunter jumper, and obstacle schooling shows at the center for years. Last season's show dates ran roughly once a month starting in September, took December off, and closed out with a rain-date show in early May, well after the market had already ended its run.

Layered together, a typical season looks something like this:

The gap in the middle of the year is the part most residents miss. Right now, in September, there is no market to plan around, only whatever show weekend the PHA has on its calendar. Anyone timing a Sunday errand around what they remember from last spring is working from the wrong half of the year.

What Actually Fills the Tables and the Rings

When the market is running, the vendor list leans toward what you would want from a produce stand rather than a craft fair: fresh and organic vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers alongside breads, pastries, and other baked goods. The specialty tables carry jam, honey, dips, sauces, fresh pasta, cheese, and pickles, the kind of lineup built for people who are there to actually shop, not just browse.

The show side draws a different but equally specific crowd. A single PHA weekend can include a WTC dressage class sponsored by Galloways Farm, an intro hunter jumper short stirrup class sponsored by a local veterinarian, a western pleasure and ranch riding division, and a lead line class for riders six and under, sponsored by a neighborhood roofing and impact windows company. These are not abstract categories. They are classes with a local tack shop, a local farm, and a local contractor putting their name on the program, which is a small but real sign of how tightly the show circuit is stitched into the surrounding business community.

The Rules That Actually Matter If You Show Up

Two practical details separate this park from every other one in the city. Every rider under 18 is required to wear a helmet under city ordinance, a rule the park posts directly on its own facility page. And Temple Park is the only park in Parkland where owners are allowed to bring their pets, which explains why it is often the default answer when someone asks where they can walk a dog on a Sunday morning without hunting for a workaround.

Neither rule is dramatic, but both are the kind of detail you only know if you have actually been there, and both shape who ends up at the Equestrian Center on any given weekend.

The Same Ground, Fifty Years Later

What ties all of this together is simple enough to miss if you only visit once. The corner Harold Bockhold secured in 1973 has spent more than five decades doing exactly what it was set aside to do, hosting horses and the people who ride them, while everything the city built around it changed. The market is the newer overlay on that land, generous but seasonal. The show calendar is the older, steadier one. Right now, mid-September, the market half is still asleep and won't stir until November 1. The show half never went anywhere.

If you have lived in Parkland for a while and only know Temple Park as the place with the farmers market, it is worth a Sunday drive when the season starts back up in a few weeks, if only to see the other calendar this same corner has been keeping all along.

Timothy Byrne has spent years learning the parts of Broward and Palm Beach County that don't show up on a portal search, from which park doubles as a dog run to which corner has been hosting horse shows since before most of the surrounding streets existed. If you're curious about a specific block, park, or pocket of Parkland or Coral Springs, Timothy Byrne is glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.