This year, she is back, now 18, working at the camp in her first year as an instructor.

Sitting down in the camp’s hall with the loud hustle and bustle of lunch going on behind her, Danella says she can’t remember her first Pony Club camp, but can recall them from about age eight.

“My horse cut his leg open on the first day, so I rode the instructor’s horse all week,” she says recalling her first memory.

The horse she now had to ride was named ‘Snooze’, which was an appropriate one for the slow horse, she says smiling.

Danella has only missed three camps in all these years and this wasn’t out of choice, but because of a leg injury she acquired riding.

“I felt like I was missing out, cause it is a really great week,” she says, “I didn’t have an excuse to play in the rain, mud and icing sugar.”

Hang on a minute, did she say icing sugar?

Danella’s favorite part of the weeklong camp (apart from sleep) is an activity called the ‘Jelly Baby gobble’, where the children ride their horses to plates filled with icing sugar and Jelly Babies and then dismount and eat from them without using their hands. Needless to say a great mess ensures.

This year, the children decided to throw the icing sugar mixture all over their instructors and hence Danella found herself covered in it.

However, she says she’s good humored about it, as she had her own fun giving the instructors a hard time when she was at the camp as a rider - a lot of it by the sounds of it.

“We’re pretty understanding, we put up with it,” she says.

So what’s it like being an instructor compared to a rider at the camp?

“It’s much more work and not as much fun,” she says, “but, it’s good to be able to teach the little kids and see them come up.”

Her mother Kathy West, who is the Pony Club’s treasurer and coordinator, says she’s very proud Danella is now working as an instructor.

“I think she’s a great ambassador for the club and for the town of Young,” she says. “It’s nice to see all the young people come back and represent the sport and the pony club.”

Although Danella refers to the children she instructs as “hard work”, throughout the conversation she continually calls out encouragement to the children and her lovely manner with them is demonstrated over and over again.

You get the feeling, after all her years of experience as a rider, Danella is an instructor the children enjoy being around.