Pleasure Driving with Kayla Benson (Doc)

Unlike the carriage horses in Downtown Memphis, Kayla Benson pleasure drives her small Welsh pony in competitions hosted in Germantown. Fellow Mid-South drivers come down
every October to participate in the Nashoba Carriage Classic.

Benson has been riding since before she could walk, but she took mostly to her English riding roots in the hunter/jumper world. Then, her friends introduced her to pleasure driving, a discipline of horseback riding that includes a horse harnessed to a carriage and the rider “driving” it.

“One of my friends, she used to have a horse that she drove Downtown, and she ended up buying him and bringing him down here,” she said. “She was like ‘Well, you should do this and do the junior drivers with him.’”

She quickly took to this new side of equestrianism and enjoyed the freedom of it. Now, she drives Crilban Viscount of Shale, or better known as “Count”, in her pleasure classes hosted by the Nashoba Carriage Association, as well as showing her two other horses in the jumpers.

“It’s very different from riding,” Benson said. “Whenever I take lessons with my trainer Joanna is always like ‘You’ve got all these bad habits,’ which are normal for riding but they’re very different for driving.”

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See Q&A here.