Name: Ela Acevedo

Grade Started at Ascension: 7th grade

Favorite Teacher: Brian Sanford

Favorite Ascension Memory: playing Uno for an entire AAA period instead of doing math homework

Future Plans: To major in animal science at LSU and get into their vet school, and then establish a large animal vet clinic

“I started riding when I was six, on and off, while I was doing soccer as well. I quit soccer because I got nailed in the face one day, and I decided I was done. Then, my mom came home from work one day at the ER and she said, ‘You need to do something. You’re just sitting on your butt all day.’ I said, ‘Well I want to go ride horses.’ She was exhausted from her 12-hour shift so she said ‘Fine.’ Little did she know what it would become, and now I have accomplished so much. Last year I was on the bronze medal team at nationals, I’ve been top 20 in the nation for the past 3 years and top 10 in the nation for the past 2, and then I got my new horse in recently, so that’s kind of what stemmed my love of animals. I remembered this recently: my mom was working at Franklin Senior High, and they had this rodeo day, and that was the first time I was put on a horse, and that was when I decided that this was what I wanted to do.”

“I always said when I was a kid, I’m gonna be a vet, and then as I grew up I fell out of it. And then recently, I realized that this is what I want to do. There is a need for more large animal vets out there. I wanted to be a chiropractor for horses, and then that kind of stemmed into me hearing about physiotherapy for humans, and I decided that I was gonna do that for horses. I also want to breed stallions and build off of my practice and build this huge ‘empire’ doing my vet work and training kids to do it and me myself still being able to ride. It will have a lot of inner workings. So basically, I combined the aspects of everything that is in the horse industry and put it all together.”