Kathleen O’Keefe is a multi-time winner of both the North American and the Virginia Field Trial Championships / Liz Callar photoKathleen O’Keefe has been named Joint-Master of the Casanova Hunt. Many feel her appointment to be a natural progression for this accomplished horsewoman. O’Keefe takes the reins of one of Virginia’s oldest foxhunting clubs, expanding a lifelong love affair with horse and field sports.
O’Keefe, fifty-four and a native of Stephens City, Virginia, started riding when she was six months old in a wicker basket saddle, she says. A fourth-generation foxhunter, her late father, grandparents and great-grandfather were riders, and she grew up foxhunting with her grandmother at the Blue Ridge Hunt in Clarke County, Virginia. “I am especially proud of my father, Peter Drinkwater,” O’Keefe says, noting he won the Virginia Field Hunter Championship twice, a feat O’Keefe repeated in 2000 with her Thoroughbred field hunter Lord Hugh.
O’Keefe showed ponies as a child and galloped racehorses as a teen. In addition to repeating her dad’s Virginia championship victory, she won the North American Field Hunter Championship in 1996, 2006, and 2011. O’Keefe was on the MFHA Centennial Field Hunter Celebration committee that organized sixteen district qualifiers. She earned the “best turned out” prize with her Thoroughbred Gol Lee in the championship finals at Morven Park.
Previous Winner Kathleen O’Keefe presents Best Turned Out Trophy to Devon Zebrovious, Middleburg Hunt, on Quest. / Douglas Lees photoShe began foxhunting with Casanova in 1992, also hunting with Loudoun and Loudoun West (now Loudoun-Fairfax) when she and husband Will O’Keefe moved to Leesburg, he to become executive director of historic Morven Park. She served as Loudoun West secretary, but gave that up when they returned to Will’s family Pine Brook Farm in Casanova territory a few years ago. Husband Will, referred to as the “Voice of Steeplechasing,” continues calling the races.
Casanova Joint-Master Joyce Fendley asked if O’Keefe would be interested in coming on as Joint-Master in May. “I was both shocked and surprised,” O’Keefe recalls. “This is a great honor, not one to be taken lightly.” She carefully considered the offer, and joined the club’s Masters, Joyce and Bill Fendley and Jeanne Clark, in late August.
So far, O’Keefe has been enjoying her new Mastership, but she already “feels the difference” between being a field member and being a Master with increased responsibility. “I’m fortunate to have Joyce and [ex-Master] Kay Blassic as my mentors,” she says. Blassic, Master from 1988 to 2005, and Fendley, Master since 1983, are sharing their collective decades of invaluable advice, O’Keefe says.
The sport of foxhunting is, as always, changing, O’Keefe notes. “Each day’s hunting teaches by example to rapidly changing conditions,” she says. “Scent, weather, pace, hounds, horses…all are changing, and you realize that no day is truly predictable.
“This ability to stay flexible is what has and what will ensure the future of foxhunting.”
Many pressures weigh heavily upon the sport and the countryside, O’Keefe adds, forcing field members and Masters alike to constantly consider the future.
“Foxhunting has endured centuries of change: wars, recessions, depressions, social upheavals,” O’Keefe says. “Generations of those who loved this sport continuously and constantly adjusted. Those of us who are privileged to enjoy hunting today will have to do the same to preserve it.”
A Community Hunt
Casanova Hunt has a rich history of embracing the central Fauquier County community it shares with the tiny village of Casanova, the growing outskirts of the county seat, Warrenton, and a changing population of the many who commute daily into nearby Washington, D.C.
Casanova hosts regular open days at the kennels at historic Weston, offering spring and fall hunter paces, a hunt clinic, junior hunt days, parties, and more. The club produces a community directory of area businesses.
Posted October 9, 2017
–Betsy Burke Parker is the longtime Horse and Field Sports Editor for The Fauquier Times in Warrenton, Virginia. This story will appear in that newspaper next month.