Most high school juniors have a hard time making plans for a Friday night, let alone the rest of their life.
But not Caroline Roffman. She eats, sleeps and dreams about dressage, and nobody's going to stop her from giving it her all.
Two years ago, Roffman burst onto the winter dressage scene in Wellington, Fla., winning almost every junior class she entered. Riding under the tutelage of Silke Rembacz, she left competitors wondering, "Where did she come from?"
"I'm born and raised in Massachusetts," said Roffman with a laugh. She learned about the Florida circuit when she sent a horse to Rembacz in Wellington to sell.
She vacationed in Florida during her April break, and since her horse was still with Rembacz, she decided to take a lesson. That began a relationship that prompted Roffman to convince her family to relocate and reorganize their lives.
"I started riding with Silke, and I figured if I was going to ride with her, I needed to ride full-time with her," explained Roffman.
She began a campaign to convince her mother and stepfather to move. She sent pictures of houses for sale to her mother, Andrea Azran, a realtor.
"I started to research Wellington, and I realized I would have to do it sooner rather than later because of the rising home values," said Azran.
"Caroline really wants this," she continued. "She went to Florida for her vacations, but I couldn't send a 14-year-old girl there to live on her own."
The move turned out to be a good one for everybody. They bought two farms and enrolled Roffman at Juno Beach Preparatory, where she can do double hours to cover days missed while showing.
Olympic Exposure
Roffman discovered dressage as an 8-year-old on a retired event horse.
"It's not that I didn't like jumping," she explained. "But when I started riding dressage, I found it more challenging. Your expectation as a rider changes. It was more about learning how to ride the horse, instead of going in the show ring."
Roffman boarded her horse at Olympic eventer Karen Stives' barn in Dover, Mass. She also was able to take some lessons from Olympic team bronze medalist Dottie Morkis.
"When I discovered that dressage was in the Olympics, I said, 'I want to do that!' " recalled Roffman.
When she sent her horse, Junker, to Rembacz, she knew she was going to need a different horse to further her ambition.
"We got up to fourth level, and I needed him to teach me a bit more, be more of a schoolmaster," Roffman explained. "I needed a horse that I could learn on, and he wasn't very forgiving."
"He was a great horse, but he was limiting her," said Rembacz. So in 2003 she and Roffman headed to Europe to find a replacement.
They came home with Caballero 37, an Oldenburg by Contango. He had shown through Grand Prix in Germany.
Things went according to plan at first. "She started showing in Wellington and won everything she went into," said Rembacz. "Linda Zang approached us about sending her to Europe to do the junior competition there."
But a nasty accident changed everything. In late April 2004 everyone at Roffman's barn gathered to go on a trail ride.
"I had finished the show season, but I still had to finish school, so I had to stay a month longer than Silke," explained Roffman. (Rembacz spends half the year in Flemington, N.J.) "I had a chance to keep him home at our farm, just to play around."
The group headed out on the bridle path when some dogs came out from behind a house and spooked Caballero.
"He took two steps sideways and slipped and fell on me," said Roffman. "He broke my leg and pulled a shoe, but he came up sound."
She was rushed to the emergency room while "Tonki" was checked for injuries. Roffman returned in a cast to find him resting comfortably in his stall with no visible injury.
"We woke up the next morning, and he had dug a hole in his stall and was standing in it," recalled Roffman. "His hind leg had swollen up to four times its normal size. We rushed him to Palm Beach Equine, and they thought his leg was broken."
It turned out that Tonki was suffering from acute lymphangitis, but the road to recovery would be rocky.
"He spent two weeks at Palm Beach Equine," Roffman remembered. "They thought he was going to founder. He had a catheter in, and he was on antibiotics. It was all from a tiny cut that got infected."
As Tonki began to recover from his infection, it was clear that he wasn't the same horse.
"He's a very sensitive horse," said Roffman. "It took him almost a year to trust me, and when the accident happened, unfortunately I was with him. It took a lot of his confidence away."
The accident dashed their hopes of attending the Junior Dressage Team Championships. "We were hoping that we could bring him back in time, but it happened that I was ready before he was," said Roffman. "I got back in the saddle with no stirrups two weeks later because I couldn't sit still."
The disappointment hit home when a letter arrived congratulating Roffman on qualifying for the JDTC in Pebble Beach, Calif.
"My mom started crying in the doorway, and I just broke down," she recalled. "But I'm happy I learned that lesson then that things go wrong with horses. Even though I worked hard for it, in one second it can all change."
Roffman didn't sit on her hands, though, while Tonki was recovering. "A man that we know, Motti Shahak, has this 7-year-old Friesian stallion, Ynze. I started riding and training him. He was a training or first level horse, so I put the changes on him and a little baby half-pass, and he was my summer project," she said.
Coming Out The Other Side
The lingering effects of the accident on Tonki persuaded Roffman's father, Stuart, to buy another horse for his daughter.
So Rembacz and Roffman headed back to Germany and brought home Bulgari, a 10-year-old Hanoverian (Baryshnikov--Evita).
"I had never had a show season in Wellington at this level before we got Tonki," said Roffman. "I had a good season, and I felt confident, and we decided I needed a horse that could eventually be my Grand Prix horse."
Bulgari and Roffman clicked immediately and have made an unbeatable team in 2005. They've routinely scored percentages in the high 60s and low 70s.
"Bulgari is a showman," said Roffman. "He goes in the show ring, and he wants every eye on him. He's very hot and electric, and I feel like I got a jackpot when I got him."
But their achievements have caused some people to snicker, to question what she really has accomplished. "People will say things without even knowing me as a person," said Roffman. "They'll assume that I'm not really serious, doing it because I can and have nice horses."
She continued, "I try to ignore it, but occasionally something will stick with you, and it hurts. I began to second-guess myself, and as that happened, my riding crashed. It wasn't conscious, but emotionally I began to get so involved in that."
Rembacz was able to help Roffman deal with the pressure and negative comments by teaching her to concentrate on the riding and to trust herself.
"She's an incredible rider," said Rembacz. "She's got four horses, and each one is different, and she can get on every single one of them. They might be very good horses, but they're not easy horses."
She continued, "She's incredibly mature, but she's 16 and wanting to please everyone, which sometimes gets the best of us in trouble."
Roffman has found support from some of her fellow competitors too. "The juniors is such a great thing," she explained. "Everyone is friendly in the young riders, but I feel like it's a family in the juniors."
When Roffman couldn't attend the JDTC, Eloise Aut was selected as an alternate. "She was so thankful in the nicest way," said Roffman. "She sent me everything from the T-shirts to the saddle pads, everything they got she sent me in a package afterwards. It was nice to see that I wasn't forgotten."
And if Roffman has her way, she won't be left out this year. The JDTC will be held at Devon (Pa.) in October, and she's already qualified on Bulgari.
"But I'm not going to say that I'm going until I'm in the ring!" she said with a laugh. And next year she has even bigger plans.
"Silke and I have been discussing moving up to the open Intermediaire I and Prix St. Georges," said Roffman. "We've been researching the rules, so I'm not sure right now. Ideally my dream would be to have Tonki in the young riders and Bulgari in the open classes."
Her determination and single-minded focus on dressage might worry some parents, but not Azran. "She knew from the start that this is what she wanted to do," she said. "Caroline really wants this. Why would you not back something when so many kids don't have a clue what they want to do?"
They tried tennis lessons, but it was clear that Roffman only had room for one passion in her life. But her parents are insisting on college.
"I get all A's, but I work pretty hard," she admitted. "I'm going to try to go to the best college I can go to, and try to figure that out with being in Wellington and New Jersey."
She's looking at the Gallatin program through New York University, which lets students design their own curriculum around their interests.
Because in the end Roffman's interest is horses. "It's not just that I want to be a rider," she said. "I want to be a trainer, and I want to breed horses, and I want to have students. I want to have that business. As much as it's hard work, that's what I love."
Helping Horses In Need
After her riding accident in 2004, Caroline Roffman had some time to kill before she could start competing again. It's no surprise that she found another way to be with horses.
Jennifer Swanson lives just a few minutes away from Roffman near Wellington, Fla., and she started an organization to rescue Premarin foals called Pure Thoughts.
"My mom rescued a yearling draft filly," said Roffman. "It was the first horse that Pure Thoughts rescued. I'd read about Premarin, and so I started going over there and got involved."
One way Roffman helped out was to write letters to 30 manufacturers of equine products, asking for donations. "They wouldn't reply to me, but the next thing I knew the UPS man would be at the door with a box of wormer," she recalled. "I got 60 flymasks once!"
In what Roffman terms a "weak moment" they adopted another foal, a red-roan colt named Elmo. "The horses came in at 3 a.m. We ran over there and helped unload them, and I just fell in love with him," she said.
Roffman worked at Pure Thoughts all summer while she and Caballero recovered. Eventually she was able to get both of her PMU rescues approved by the American Warmblood registry. |
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