By Laura Scaletti
Portraits by Isabel J. Kurek
It’s not often you go to buy a piece of farm equipment and come home with a new horse. However, that’s exactly how Cat Driscoll found her first jumper, Forever Blue.
Cat and her dad had found an ad in the paper for a Kubota and decided to go check it out. “When we arrived at the address listed in the ad, we found out the Kubota was at a Thoroughbred layup farm. I started talking to the farm manager and he told me, ‘We have all of these Thoroughbreds, why don’t you pick one out of the field?’ He went around with us and showed us which ones came off the track sound,” Cat said. “We saw a beautiful 4-year-old chestnut mare that looked athletic. So I told him I would take that one.”
With a new partner picked out, Cat was ready to start a new adventure and a new discipline. “When I was 16, I decided to switch over to jumpers. I realized that my Quarter Horse wasn’t going to be competitive in the Children’s Hunters. I didn’t really have much in the way of money, so I felt I had a better shot of being competitive in the jumpers rather than in the hunters,” she said.
Cat took her 4-year-old mare home and got to work. Without a trainer at the time, Cat restarted the mare herself and found out her instincts had been correct: Forever Blue was indeed athletic. The duo started in the Children’s Jumpers and worked their way up to the 1.30m jumpers.
In 2013, Cat and Forever Blue won the $10,000 North American League (NAL) Adult Jumper Final at the Pennsylvania National Horse Show. “Being able to see the sport in a different light, competing at the higher-end shows, helped me solidify my future goals. I always knew I wanted to be in the horse industry and seeing what I accomplished with Forever Blue kept me on the path to pursuing my dreams,” Cat said.
Cat’s path to becoming a professional rider has been a long and winding road. However, Cat believes every stop along the way has added value to the rider and horsewoman she is today as the head rider at Plain Bay Farm where she regularly competes in FEI jumper classes.
Self-Starter
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Cat drove past a small lesson barn, Appleton Acres, daily with her family. “I would see the horses out the window and just knew that’s what I wanted to do. When I was 5, I started taking lessons and my two older sisters joined me,” she said.
Taking lessons wasn’t enough for Cat; It didn’t take long before she wanted to show. “In the beginning, my parents weren’t so keen on us doing horse shows. They thought that it was nice for us to take lessons and be able to ride. But I’m a competitive person and so badly wanted to compete,” Cat said.
Cat got that first opportunity to show about a year and a half after she started taking lessons, at a little in-barn show hosted by Appleton Acres. For the next five years, Cat competed on the local circuit at Harford Horse Shows Association and Chester County Horse Show Association shows.
When Cat was 11 years old, she made moves to help further her equestrian dreams. “A friend I had met through the local shows introduced me to the rated circuit and I started going to small B- and C-rated horse shows in the area. I ended up moving from the lesson barn where I got my start to a new trainer and purchased my Quarter Horse,” Cat said. “Once I was introduced to the world of rated shows, I wanted to do bigger and better things and wanted to go to better horse shows.”
At the same time Cat was expanding her horizons in the saddle, her family made the decision to move 20 minutes away to Maryland where they could have a small farmette. “Although my parents weren’t really horsey, my dad really enjoyed being around the horses so they bought the farmette, with an eight-stall barn and several paddocks, so we could have horses at home,” Cat said.
Cat didn’t know it at the time, but the experience she gained taking care of the family’s horses would prove to be invaluable when she became a professional one day. “I’ve always been a very hands-on person with horses. Now that I’m older and a professional, I realize the experiences I had when I was younger truly shaped the way I’ve built relationships with horses over the years,” she said. “What I thought were just daily chores at the time—handling horses, cleaning stalls, and grooming—ended up teaching me so much about interacting with horses.”
Making Her Move
Although Cat always knew in her heart that she was going to work in the horse industry, she tucked the idea away and decided to go to college to get a degree. “Being working-class, non-horse people, my parents didn’t really entertain the idea of going pro right out of high school. So I went to the University of Delaware, which was 10 minutes from home. I was able to live at home, take care of the horses and still go to class,” Cat said. “After a year in college, I realized I was going for my parents, not for myself; it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to be a professional rider.”
Cat dropped out of school during her sophomore year and got to work turning her dreams into reality. “I wanted to ride at the highest level, but at the time, I didn’t know how to make it happen. It was hard to see a path forward, but I knew that I wanted to be in the industry in some aspect regardless,” she said.
After deciding to follow her heart, Cat moved to Aiken, South Carolina, to work for eventer Ryan Wood. Cat groomed for Ryan for a year, eventually riding a few of his event horses. She then ended up working as a groom for three years for one of his owners who had both event horses and show jumpers.
“I still didn’t have a clear-cut idea of how I was going to become a professional show jumper, but I worked as hard as I could for different people and tried to make connections and build experiences. I told myself when the moment came along, when I got that breakthrough opportunity, I wanted to be prepared,” she said. “That was the way I could prepare myself to shine when the opportunity presented itself.”
When the USHJA Emerging Athletes Program (EAP) was created in 2009, Cat was intrigued. “It really spoke to me and where I was, someone at the grassroots level who was struggling to find a way forward. That’s the heart and soul of the program: trying to find riders and develop them. Unfortunately, when EAP first started, I had just gotten Forever Blue and we weren’t yet jumping 1.10m,” she said. “I just kept watching the program and thought I missed my window, as it was initially only offered to riders 18 years old and younger.”
Thankfully, EAP extended the age range to 25 years old. In 2018, when Cat was 25, she was in a position where she could afford the application fee and met all the program’s rider specifications.
Cat didn’t just participate in in the 2018 Lindsay Maxwell Charitable Fund/USHJA Emerging Athletes Program National Training Session, she bested a field of 24 riders to be the 2018 National Training Session winner.
EAP Connections
While at the EAP National Training Session, Cat met EAP Stable Manager Colleen Reed. At the end of the program, Cat had asked Colleen to let her know if she heard of any job opportunities. A few months later, Cat was chatting with Colleen when Colleen mentioned she had spoken to Katie Monahan-Prudent and put in a good word for Cat.
“Colleen told me to give her a call and see what Katie could do for me. I called Katie, set up an interview and traveled to Florida to meet with her. Katie asked me what I was looking to do and I told her I wanted to be a professional rider. She told me, ‘I can’t help you with that; I’m not looking for a rider, I’m looking for a groom,’” Cat said. “I said, ‘That’s fine, I can groom.’”
Cat didn’t care what her role at Katie and Henri Prudent’s Plain Bay Farm was, she simply wanted to be part of a program that has produced so many great riders—Laura Kraut, Beezie Madden and Kim Prince to name a few—and horses. In April 2019, Cat started working as a groom for Plain Bay Farm.
“I just kept my head down and tried to learn as much as I could. My philosophy has always been whatever I’m doing, I want to be able to do it to the best of my ability. So, if I was going to be a groom at Plain Bay Farm, I wanted to be the best groom in the barn,” she said.
As time went on, Katie began to give Cat a few opportunities to flat sales and client horses. At the end of the first year, Katie pulled Cat aside and let her know they were bringing over a few 8-year-old homebreds from France.
“She told me I’d been working hard and this horse was going to be mine to ride, train and show. The horse, Blue Diamant, is actually still in the barn—we sold him in-barn and he’s the horse I won my first national Grand Prix on at Tryon,” she said.
Having the ride on Blue Diamant was the opportunity Cat had been waiting for and was the start of her transitioning from being a groom to a rider. In 2021, that role expanded even more when Abigail McArdle left Plain Bay to start her own business and Cat was able to step into her head rider position.
Time to Shine
Cat believes hard work, proper hard work, does not go unnoticed. “I always tried to make myself very useful in the barn. If a horse needed to be shipped to the clinic, I could ship it. If someone needed to stay late at the barn, I stayed late. No matter what needed to be done, I always volunteered,” she said. “Making yourself available and useful shows others how much you’re willing to put into being part of the industry.”
Although Cat didn’t get her break until her late 20s, the hard work she put in the years before helped create the connections and opportunities that eventually came her way. “I always had a strong sense that my time and place would come. I held on to this hope that if I worked hard and just kept going, my opportunity would come,” Cat said.
Rather than focusing on what she wasn’t currently competing in, Cat focused on the moment she was in. “I knew with some of the horses I rode along the way, they wouldn’t be the one that I was going to win a Grand Prix on or be on a team with, but I knew that they could be the horse where I learned how to perfect my distances or to ride a track to perfection. I might not have been progressing as quickly as I wanted, but I was going to make the best of the moment I was in,” she said. “For sure it was hard in the moment to be patient, but when the opportunity finally came, I was ready for it.”
Cat has made the most of the opportunity she’s been given at Plain Bay. It was with Plain Bay that she first entered the Grand Prix ring.
“Two years prior, when I was a groom, I was watching the Grand Prix in Kentucky with the barn manager at the time, Hunter Hawk. He said, ‘I bet you’re standing there thinking how you’d ride the course if you had a horse in the class.’
“I told him, ‘Yes, one day I will have a horse in this class.’” Cat said. “Two years later I was riding in that class. It was so exciting.”
From that first Grand Prix class to today, Cat has successfully competed through the CSI5* level with dozens of podium finishes and numerous wins. She’s also been a member of Team USA on multiple Nations Cup teams.
In 2022, Cat traveled to Spain and Portugal as part of the CSI3* team. “It’s a very special moment putting on the team jacket that first time. So many emotions hit you and the pressure of riding for your country and having a team counting on you is quite different than riding for yourself and your owners. It was even more exciting, when I jumped clear in the first round in Portugal and we ended up second overall,” Cat said.
Right now, with a group of nice horses who are jumping in CSI5* classes and several young horses coming up the ranks, Cat is excited about what the future holds. “I’d like to aim for jumping on some five-star teams next year. Thinking ahead, I’d like to compete in the World Cup Finals, World Equestrian Games and maybe even the Olympics someday,” Cat said. “Wherever my journey takes me, it’s so much fun getting to bring these horses along and compete them at the top level of the sport.”
Follow Cat on Instagram @cathleen.driscoll
Photos by Isabel J. Kurek, www.isabeljkurekphotography.com
