The Auburn Women's Equestrian team will compete this Friday in the Varsity Equestrian National Championships in Waco, Texas. The team received the No. 2 seeds in both the Western and Hunt Seat divisions, earning a bye round Thursday before entering the competition.
The No. 2 seed for the Western bracket marks a progression for the team and shows the impact of the work of assistant coach Lisa Helfer, who joined the program three years ago to help recruit and train the riders in the Western events.
"Now this Western side is really starting to come on as a big force in varsity equestrian," Helfer said. "They've got to look out for all of Auburn now and not just the Hunt Seat side."
Helfer said the team has been strong in Hunt Seat competitions the past five or six years, last winning the national Hunt Seat championship in 2008.
The Western side of the program, a riding style featuring different events such as reigning and horsemanship, has been building to match.
"For the past two years I've been focusing a lot on recruiting for the Western side," Helfer said. "This is the first year that the recruits are starting to come around that I had a hand in recruiting with Coach Williams."
The equestrian life started early for Helfer, who received a pony when she was 8 years old. Eventually, her drive for riding trumped her first love, hockey. She turned down an Ivy League offer to play women's hockey to attend the University of Findlay in Ohio, a small private college with an equestrian studies program.
After receiving her bachelor's degree in equestrian studies, Helfer trained riders and worked in equine reproduction. She accepted a coaching position with Miami University in Ohio and worked with the program three years before coming to Auburn.
"I absolutely love Auburn," Helfer said. "It became home almost instantaneously."
After working in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, Helfer said her relationships with equestrian head coach Greg Williams and assistant coach Lindsay Neubarth were essential to her adjustment and a key factor in the team's success.
"A lot of coaches have good ideas, but they can't make it into an accomplished format where the athletes are actually making progress," Williams said. "She can actually work them hard and make a lot of progress, which is why she has them as one of the best Western teams in the entire country."
Helfer's high points with the Auburn equestrian team include victories in the 2008 Hunt Seat National Championship and the recent Southeastern Championship, where Auburn took both the Hunt Seat and Western divisions for the first time in six years.
Helfer said some of her favorite memories with the team are of the riders with whom she works.
"That's one of the best things for me as a coach, watching them get better and progress and succeed," Helfer said. "I love working with the student athletes."
Bailey Dymond, junior in animal sciences and equine sciences and Western rider, said Helfer was goal-oriented and driven.
"She's very nice, very approachable and very open-minded," Dymond said. "Those are all great qualities to have in a coach."
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