WHS senior Casebolt signs with Texas A&M
A Wapakoneta High School senior on Thursday signed her letter of intent to attend Texas A&M University to participate in equestrian sports.
Gracie Casebolt, who has been competing on horseback for years, said she’s looking forward to competing as a NCAA athlete on the college level.
“I’ll be competing headto-head with other horses and riders,” Casebolt said,
explaining her expertise is in competition reining. Western Reining, as it is formally called, is based on
set patterns where riders and their horses are tested
in a series of maneuvers including spins, stops, flying lead changes and circles with changes in size and speed.
Casebolt has many years of horsemanship behind
her, starting when she was 8 years old, first seen competing locally as a member
of the Prospects 4-H Club and now as an FFA member, and as a rider through the competition circuit.
She has a number of titles, medals and trophies to her
credit. Among the most recent are Youth Equestrian
Development Association National Champion Junior High Sapphire Division, National Snaffle Bit Association World Team Champion with the YEDA
Dream Team and also the NSBA World Champion Junior Intermediate
Horsemanship title. She
was the 2018 NSBA World Champion Junior Ranch Riding title holder as well
and won the Reserve Hi Point Junior High Rider YEDA National Championship.
Her mom couldn’t be prouder.
“The odds of her doing this, without ever owning a
horse herself,” Stacey Casebolt
said of her daughter’s recruitment to the College
Station, TX university, “… she has worked with some wonderful people who
have allowed her to work with their horses. They’ve
opened doors for her that I wasn’t able to.”
Once she gets to Texas A&M that flexibility of being able to work with different
horses will stand Casebolt in good stead. No competitive rider brings a
horse to college. Instead, the school has a stable of
horses the students work with and when it’s time to compete — either at home or away — a rider is assigned a quarter horse and has four minutes to warm up and get to the know the
horse before its time to enter the ring.
“It’s called a catch ride system,” Casebolt said. “You’re assigned a horse that day and you figure it out.”
The equestrian seasons at the college level are held in
both the spring and fall, mainly because the competitions are held outdoors. The fall season is September through November; the
spring session culminates in the national championships that are held in Ocala, Fla.
Casebolt, who will graduate in the spring and head south in August, is all smiles about her future.
She hopes to be veterinarian and plans to continue
competing after college. And, by that time, she plans
to own her own horse.