Cara is a Grand Prix dressage rider and trainer based in Lehigh Valley, PA.   She is a USDF gold, silver and bronze medalist and received many of her scores, but most notably her gold medal scores, on a Hhot Tamale, a horse which she alone trained  from 1st level to Grand Prix.  An avid competitor, Cara has competed regularly at Dressage at Devon, GAIG Regional finals, BLMs among others.  She has shown 50+ horses in dressage shows with excellent results.  Cara is also enrolled in the L program and hopes to graduate with distinction in 2020 and continue in her judges training. She has ridden at symposiums with top trainers including Carl Hester, Charlotte Dujardin, Monica Theodorescu, among others. When not riding and competing herself she is usually found teaching and coaching her students at horse shows.  Cara loves to teach and feels that it’s her job to teach her students how to think through problems so they can confidently ride their own horses and achieve their goals.

 

Cara grew up a horse crazy kid in Chester County, PA.  She worked all through middle school and high school as a working student for a local dressage trainer, Erika Fleury.  While there, Cara had the opportunity to ride many different horses of all levels, and more specifically, many different breeds. She gained experience on Arabs, Quarter Horses, Lipizzaner crosses and Thoroughbreds, as well as more traditional warmbloods.  This instilled into Cara early on that dressage is beneficial to every breed of horse and helpful in making them a better athlete overall. 

 

After graduating high school Cara attended Ursinus College and received a bachelors in Business. During collage Cara worked as an assistant trainer to Ange Bean at Straight Forward Dressage.  It was with Ange that Cara developed a sense for teaching; as Ange really has a talent for teaching all levels of students on all types of horses regardless of their ability or past experiences.  While in college Cara also trained New Forest ponies for Trevelyan Farm, gaining even more experience with non-traditional breeds.

 

After college Cara took a job in the Lehigh Valley working for Rolling Stone Farm, a large breeding farm of German Oldenburgs.  Cara remained at RSF for 8 years moving from assistant trainer to head trainer. This job allowed her to ride dozens of different horses, as it was a very active breeding and sales barn.  During her tenure there Cara had the opportunity to ride more horses than many people do in a lifetime.  She also became very interested in bloodlines and how they affect the ride-ability of horses.  Working at a breeding farm gave her the chance to prepare and present stallions for licensing and mares for performance tests.  In her time she presented 5 stallions for licensing with 3 being approved by the GOV and around 50 mares for the mare performance test almost half receiving a premium title. Showing was also a major part of her job, and Cara showed over 30 different RSF horses in her time there, claiming many wins and top placings at numerous shows including Dressage at Devon, Regionals and BLM championships.  Many of her competition horses were also All Breeds winners and top placers in the Horse of the Year categories.  Cara truly values her time at Rolling Stone Farm as it gave her access to top horses to show and invaluable educational opportunities having so many different horses to ride and develop. 

 

At the end of 2019 Cara left Rolling Stone Farm to begin her own business, Cara Klothe Dressage.  

 

As Cara’s business grows she looks forward to helping other achieve their goals as she works towards her own goals of one day representing the USA in international competition.