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Lindsay Sceats is determined to keep horses in her life, whatever it takes. Her family wasn’t horsey, but they lived down the street from a barn that held the junior rodeo fnals in Colorado Springs (CO). By the age of seven, Lindsay started lessons on western trail horses, but soon switched to English because she wanted to jump. She got her frst equine at nine and she’s still crazy about horses and riding, especially jumping. In addition to maintaining a 3.95 GPA at Mount Holyoke (MA), Lindsay won the Cacchione Cup at the 2010 Intercollegiate Horse Show Association’s Nationals: it’s the highest individual accolade bestowed by the IHSA. C .J. Law, head riding coach at Mount Holyoke, claims that if anyone can combine riding with medical school and then balance a career successfully with grand prix jumping, it’s Lindsay.

LS: Winning the Ronnie Mutch Scholarship. It was a great experience getting to work with so many top trainers. We have good trainers in Colorado, but not the breadth that you have on the East Coast and in Florida. I was 14 or 15, and my mother came for part of the time and my trainer for a week. What stands out in my mind is the time people spent doing fat work with their horses. They weren’t just hacking. They were training to compete.

LS: I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to an all-girls school and try the East Coast. I ended up getting a scholarship for academics, and my mom said if I went to Mount Holyoke I could take my Danish Warmblood gelding, Waldi (aka Puffy), and that did the trick. Once I got here, I loved the riding team and the combination of academics and horses, so I stayed.

LS: My freshman and sophomore years, I was learning how to do it. Last year was a stand-out year. Mount Holyoke has a great history of producing good open riders who go on to be very competitive in the Cacchione class, so it was nice to follow in their footsteps. We all [27 qualified riders] competed in the jumping and flat rounds. Then they brought back 10 or 12 for another jumping and flat round. I made that cut, but didn’t know where I stood. The third round put me into the final four. Winning the team competition is so important to all of us, because of the emphasis on sportsmanship and team spirit, but it’s also pretty impressive when a school can claim they had a winning Cacchione Cup rider.

LS: She’s really good about making sure the horse is in front of your leg. She helped me to put horses together correctly on the fat and incorporate lateral work – getting on horses you’ve never seen before and riding them with a positive attitude and not getting sucked into thinking that you got the bad draw. She’s a great lady. She keeps a lot of us organized all the time, and we really appreciate all she does. C. J.’s big on sportsmanship. No matter what kind of ride you’ve had, you get off, pat the horse, take it back to the handler and then, if you need to be by yourself for a few moments, that’s fne, but you don’t ever take it out on the horse. She’s a really cool horseman. She’s a good leader to have.

LS: I always said I wanted to be a doctor or a jockey, but I grew too tall to be a jockey. I’m heading to Stanford in the fall. It was the only one with a barn on campus, so it had to be that medical school and the old man (Puffy) is being dragged along. I would love to keep riding as an amateur. Eventually I would love to get a judge’s card. There will always be horses in some shape or form in my life. I’m going to Spruce Meadows with Puffy. I’m so excited: it’s my frst time ever to show at Spruce and we’re doing the Low Amateur Jumpers. My ambition is to move up eventually to High Amateur. Puffy’s 18 now – he used to be a Grand Prix jumper. I need his clone so I can go after my goal of competing Grand Prix someday.

Mount Holyoke’s Lindsay Sceats shows her form over fences en route to winning the 2010 Cacchione Cup with a ‘luck of the draw’ horse from host Skidmore.

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