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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

Lora Kay: Following in Her Teacher’s Footsteps

Ask Lora Kay Witterstaeter what it’s like having Kelly as a teacher and the junior rider, who finished fourth in the Junior Championships with Weltkaar, has nothing but good things to say about the teacher who is only a few years older than her.

“Working with Jodie is a lot of fun. She’s like my big sister and really great. She helps me with everything,” Witterstaeter said. The junior rider has Kelly’s former young rider horse and she said Kelly has provided her with a lot of help with a horse that Kelly herself said could be difficult. “She knows everything about him, like all his quirks. It makes it a lot easier for me.”

Weltkaar is no easy ride, mostly because of the size difference between the two. “He’s 18.2 and I’m five-foot nothing,”Witterstaeter said. “He’s a lot of horse and he’s very big to move around. But he’s so much fun. He’s like a big Teddy Bear.

He’s very sensitive and you wouldn’t think it. You’d think he’s very powerful. He’s hard to keep energetic. He starts getting a little long and a little slow and that can be hard for me because I don’t have a whole lot of body strength. But he listens. He doesn’t take advantage of me. He’s very sweet about it.”

Witterstaeter, of Fort Walton Beach, Florida, has been riding since she was three, having started out with hunter/jumper ponies. She also started dressage young because her mother made her take dressage lessons with the ponies. Witterstaeter said she’s rather fallen into dressage because she couldn’t find a good hunter/jumper trainer in her area. But she loves riding with Kelly and since Kelly’s focus is dressage, Witterstaeter has followed suit.