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Thursday, June 21, 2007

Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF Dressage Festival of Champions

Jodie Kelly and Lora Kay Witterstaeter: Teacher and Student Share Gladstone Experience
By Lynndee Kemmet for Dressagedaily.com

Gladstone, New Jersey – When not preparing for competition in the Brentina Cup Championships in this year’s Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF Dressage Festival of Champions, Jodie Kelly was busy helping her student prepare for the Junior Championships.

There aren’t many 23-year-olds who are successful riders, capable of training a horse to FEI level and skilled enough as a teacher to guide a student to a national championship competition. But Kelly is all that and more.

Dutch trainer Toine Hoef, with whom Kelly has trained for many years, put it best when he said “a lot of people can ride a Grand Prix horse but not many people can make one.” That makes Kelly unique among riders, but even more unique among young riders.

Kelly competed in this year’s Brentina Cup on a 12-year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding named Manhattan (Uniform out of Tasjadana) that she trained herself. The pair had a great showing, finishing third with a score of 63.689 and behind first-place finishers Elizabeth Austin and Olivier and second-place finishers Nicholia Zamora and Nimbus.

“I got Manhattan when he was just coming three and I was turning 13. I was at that point in my life where I needed another horse, something a little more than I had,” Kelly said. “I really didn’t know what I was looking for and we had a limited budget. I think that’s how most young riders end up with young horses because you only have this much to spend and our choices were having an older schoolmaster that had a little bit less quality or having one that was young and had a little more quality.”

Faced with those two choices, Kelly opted for number two. And while she could have also bought a youngster and sent it out for training, a more affordable approach was for her to train a horse herself. And so she did.

The transformation from rider to professional trainer, which Manhattan has certainly helped her achieve, has not been without its rough phases. “It’s been an interesting journey,” Kelly said.