Written by Barbara Newtown

Original Publish Date October 2014

Knollwood Farm Equestrian Center, in Sunset, Louisiana, is a little jewel. Leafy trees arch over paddocks and jumper arenas. Horses of all shapes graze in peace. Happy dogs lounge near the washrack. Owner, trainer, and teacher Kitty Leblanc and her husband Terry have created the perfect environment for introducing a beginner to the world of horses…and the perfect environment for preparing talented riders to leap over the “big sticks.”

When I pull into Knollwood’s sun-dappled drive, I spot Kitty sitting on a barrel in a small arena, not much larger than a round corral. It turns out that she is giving a first-time lesson to an aspiring teenage rider. The student pays careful attention as Kitty asks her to walk on, change direction, look up, and make small circles around barrels placed to the inside of the circumference. Kitty’s voice is soft and soothing and her commands are clear.

It’s a lesson tailored to a beginner, but I can tell that Kitty is laying a foundation for the skills a rider will need at the highest levels of dressage or jumping: the student is learning to plan ahead, make her plan clear to the horse, and ride accurate figures. I am impressed by Kitty’s school horse, a big grey. He is quiet, but he maintains a steady walk. He doesn’t do anything unless the rider tells him. Kitty tells the student to ask the horse to look to the inside as they begin their curve around the barrel.

“Look up,” says Kitty. “Not down at the barrel. Your head weighs a lot, and when you look down the horse can feel it.”

Kitty asks the rider if she’d like to take the horse on a walk. She agrees, and Kitty says, “First trail ride!” Kitty strikes off on a tour around the paddocks and down the driveway. The grey follows, and as we walk through the trees and down the drive towards her house Kitty tells me his story.

“When I came to try him out, he was already bridled,” she says. “I rode him and he was fine. But after I got him home I discovered that someone had abused him and he was terribly head-shy. It took months for me to get him to drop his head!” She turns around and asks her student to halt. Kitty places her hand on the horse’s poll and his head sinks down; his eyes are half-closed in lazy contentment.

After the lesson, Kitty and I wander among her horses. A large part of her livelihood is finding prospects, tuning them up, and either reselling them or keeping them as school horses. She has recently bought a couple of Dutch Warmblood crosses that are products of the Angola prison farm. It’s strange seeing handsome, European-style horses with the huge, utilitarian, Angola freeze brands on their hips. Kitty also has Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses who have found new careers, and some talented ponies.

We stroll down the drive to the Leblanc’s comfortable, rustic home. Kitty introduces me to Terry, who bears a large responsibility for making Knollwood a haven. I am astonished by his garden—not the usual hodgepodge of tomatoes and peppers and lettuce and lonely corn, but an expansive stretch of berries, figs, persimmons… I’ve never seen so many baby fig trees. “They’re easy,” says Terry. “Just stick a cutting in the ground!” But I suspect there’s more to it, just like Kitty’s lesson. Simple on the surface, but based on a ton of knowledge.

We go inside and Terry serves coffee and persimmons while Kitty shows me her scrapbooks.

“This isn’t Louisiana,” I say, looking at a snapshot of Terry on a horse with looming mountains in the background.

“We go to Colorado whenever we can,” says Kitty. “Sometimes we haul horses along and we ride in the mountains. The smell of the mountain air is wonderful.”

Kitty shows me a picture of a tall, black Thoroughbred. “His name is Concho. For a time I thought he was going to be my next world champion jumper. But he could never get rid of the racetrack mentality. He would be fine for a couple of jumps, but then…! I decided to take him to Colorado. Terry said, ‘Don’t take your best show horse to the mountains!’ But he was fabulous. He had great endurance.”

We admire a shot of Kitty’s student Hannah Boziden, who is on the equestrian team at Baylor University. Her form over the fence is perfect. “I am proud to say that I taught her,” says Kitty. Many of Kitty’s riders have gone on to Division, State, and Regional Championships. They start getting show experience by competing at the local level in the Hub City Hunter Jumper Association.

Kitty shows me pictures of her daughter Holly, who trains and teaches and lives at Knollwood, too. Her husband Jean-Louis is a math teacher. Their 5-year-old daughter Adelaide, says Kitty, “is the apple of my eye.” Holly and her husband also have a daughter, Ellie, 3, and a son, Liam, almost 2. Kitty and Terry also have three sons, Forest, Eric, and Joseph. They all ride beautifully. Forest has three children, one son and two daughters.

One of Kitty’s students, DeAnna Huval, assists with lessons. Kitty hopes that DeAnna will join Knollwood someday as an instructor.

Finally Kitty tells her own story. Growing up in Lafayette, Louisiana, Kitty never saw jumping competitions—or even English riding. A woman in the area, Pattie Forman, wanted her daughter to learn “proper” technique and brought in Colonel Roberto Perea, from Colombia, to teach dressage and jumping. “I went to watch a lesson,” says Kitty, “and I thought it was the sissiest thing I’d ever seen. Plus there was all this equipment on her horse, side reins, running martingale… I thought it was ridiculous. But then I saw her jump, and I thought that looked like fun!”

Kitty tried jumping at home, but she quickly learned that jumping in a Western saddle was NOT fun. So she jumped bareback. Her horse, an AQHA barrel horse, decided that he loved leaping over fences. Suddenly Kitty wanted to learn as much as possible about jumping. “That fraction of a second when you’re airborne…that’s it!”

She found a hunter-jumper barn in Beaumont, Texas. It turned out to be a facility that operated at the highest levels of the sport. Cal and Vi Tipton, owners of the facility, brought in nationally known jumper riders like Melanie Smith or Kathy Kusner.

Kitty’s dear friend Elaine Claus would pick Kitty and her horse up in Lafayette and they’d drive over together to take lessons. “When I turned 16 and got my license, I would come home from school on Friday afternoon, hook up, load up, and drive to Beaumont for the weekend.” Kitty borrowed a jumping saddle for her first year of lessons with the Tiptons. She proceeded to adapt her Quarter Horse to the demands of the jumper ring. He was fast, agile, and hot-headed—and turned out to be hard to beat in a “speed” class—a timed jump course. He was only 15.1, but they competed successfully from 3’ 6” to 4 feet. Above four feet, the spreads were a bit much for him. In jumper classes, spread jumps must be 2 to 6 inches wider than the height.

Vi Tipton was German, very strict and very precise. “She was hard to ride with,” says Kitty. “I’d do dressage with her. We’d start at 5 am on Saturday morning with a two-mile run, then we’d eat a big breakfast, then ride fifteen horses. And then I’d drive back to Lafayette on Sunday night.” Her father was competitive and loved to watch Kitty ride. He paid attention to the way the Tiptons were training his daughter. The Tiptons were not interested in traveling to shows, so Kitty’s father became her coach. He would give advice and set jumps for her in the practice arena.

Kitty realizes that working with the Tiptons was an incredible opportunity. “My dad would give me a check to give to them, but they wouldn’t take the money. I’d take a lesson on my horse, then ride ten of theirs. They were getting their money’s worth! I sat on a lot of different horses, some very good, some not so good. One time the Tiptons asked me to ‘get the kinks’ out of one horse. He’d come to a fence and refuse, refuse, refuse. Then, when he’d finally jump, on the other side of the fence he’d break into bucking. He bucked me off six times. Ultimately I was exhausted. I looked up and said mournfully, ‘Can I just do some flat work and trot over a pole? I promise I’ll try jumping him again tomorrow.’ They grudgingly said Okay. And the next day he was better! I tell my students, as they’re brushing the sand off their pants, ‘If you only get bucked off once a day, that’s good!’” Kitty learned technique and toughness at the Tipton’s barn.

Kitty attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for a while and put in applications at five or six training facilities around the nation. She joined Fox Hollow Equestrian Center in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, and was looking forward to training with Jeremy Beal, the “trainer of trainers.” But it turned out that Jeremy would be gone all year giving clinics around the country. Another instructor was brought in from the French National Riding School in Saumur. “He was very military, and we didn’t hit it off at all. His dressage training was very equipment-oriented—gogues, chambons,” says Kitty. She loved the seminars, however: horse conformation, rider conformation, techniques of training.

“I should have stayed on longer in the Northeast,” she says. “I had an invitation to work at a national A-circuit barn in New Jersey, Four Seasons Farm. If I had been wise, I would have taken that position. I would have really learned the business. The instructor there was also from Saumur, and we hit it off. But I was so homesick. I was going to bring my horses home and leave them there, because I had so many horses to ride up North. But when I got back here I realized how much I missed my family. We had this farm already, and I quickly got some lessons going.”

After some time in Lafayette, Kitty got the notion that she’d like to train in Europe. She applied for working-student positions at two barns, one in France and one in Germany. The barn from France called and asked her to come for a trial run. “In the meantime,” says Kitty, “Terry and I had started dating. We got married, I had Holly right away…” Kitty didn’t go to Europe. She turned her vision to her growing family and to the little farm in Sunset, Louisiana.

“My daughter says, ‘Sometimes we have big success, and sometimes we just have to trudge.’” One day Kitty was exhausted from riding and teaching. Her daughter said, “It’s okay. We just have to put on the harness and keep trudging!” Kitty believes that if we continue to be faithful in the little things, the Lord will be faithful to us in the big things that really matter.

Kitty has worked with children with neurological or behavioral problems and has seen miracles. One young boy had Tourette’s, but his compulsive tics would disappear while he was riding. After a few lessons, his mother told Kitty that he had actually read a book all weekend—a horse book. Until then, in school, he could only complete a paragraph. The riding lessons gave him the gift of concentration. Kitty says, “He turned out to be absolutely brilliant on the back of a horse. And today he is a news anchor out in California.”

Kitty worked with a young boy who suffered from moderate to severe autism. He had poor communication skills and could barely put sentences together. “I figured the more physical I could make the ride, the better it would be,” says Kitty.   She urged the horse into a big trot and ran alongside. “I kept saying, ‘T-R-O-T TROT! T-R-O-T TROT!’ The boy was giggling and learning the posting rhythm.” After the ride, he stood by the horse and rubbed on it. His mother was amazed, because he normally had an aversion to touching things. It was clear that he loved the feel of the horse. As he patted the horse’s coat, he would say “T-R-O-T TROT!” His mother said that after a riding session he would have several hours of clarity.

Kitty sums up her mission: “I love training horses, but I think the enduring satisfaction comes from training the kids. If they become professional riders, that’s awesome, but if I’ve benefitted them in any way, that’s the reward. Over and over I see God putting in my path kids that have a need. I get the blessing of helping them with something in their lives.”