Stella Willis strokes her goat, Niki, during the 4-H Intermediate Showmanship competition.

Judge Constance Wilmoth asks Stella Willis questions about her goat, Niki, at the Crawford County Fair this week.

Stella Willis strokes her goat, Niki, during the 4-H Intermediate Showmanship competition.

During the COVID-19 pandemic many bored people picked up new hobbies. You couldn’t find a bike to buy if you tried. Just about everyone tried their hand at making loaves of sourdough bread.

For one area teen, her COVID hobby was showing goats. In her first year of showing, 13-year-old Stella Willis, of Cherrytree, and her goats, Niki and Alyssa, found themselves competing at the Crawford County Fair.

Willis spent a lot of time at the Crawford County Fairgrounds competing with her goats this week. On Wednesday, she showed the judges what she has learned this year, participating in the 4-H Intermediate Goat Showmanship competition.

“It was great to have good competition with other people,” said Willis. “I think I quite like showing at the fair.”

Willis took home a fifth place finish in the competition, beating out a couple of other showmen in the process.

“I could’ve done better, but I did decent,” she said. For someone with less than a year of experience showing at agricultural fairs, placing fifth in a competition at what is called the largest agricultural fair east of the Mississippi, is a good start to her showing career.

Competing over the last year, Willis has learned that she likes showing goats. She knows she definitely likes it more than softball.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, her parents told her she needed to pick up a new hobby.

“When COVID hit, they said I needed a new sport or to join 4-H. I didn’t want to do sports, so I chose 4-H because I quite like animals,” she said. “I was never very good at softball anyway.”

Animals have always been a part of her life, so she thought she may as well start competing. Raised on a farm in Cherrytree, Willis has always helped take care of the horses, sheep, pigs and bunnies that the family had.

Willis’ parents decided to add two goats to the family farm, and she started going to 4-H meetings.

Before going to the Crawford County Fair, Willis went to a goat show held at the Venango County Fairgrounds. She took home a second place ribbon in one of the events she entered.

“I got second place in something, I don’t remember what it was,” she said. That has led to her building some confidence in her goat showing skills. “It’s only my first year. I would like to say I’m decent at it,” she said.

On Wednesday, Willis found herself competing in the fair’s 4-H Intermediate Goat Showmanship competition. According to Amber Walker, who helps with the competition and has been in the dairy goat community “almost all her life,” the competitions for the breeds are more about the animals.

For the showmanship competitions, “This is all about the kids and how they show,” she said.

That doesn’t mean the goats can get away with not being in tip top shape. Before they enter the arena, Willis said she went over every inch of her goat, Niki.

Since Niki is a black goat, she clipped her days before the show to make sure that the clipping marks didn’t show. Just before the competition starts, Willis went over Niki’s coat with windex to “make it shiny,” and made sure the hooves looked in tip top shape.

She did admit that she took a little too much off Niki’s tail. You normally want it to look like a paintbrush, but Niki’s looked like a paint brush that had been pressed flat against a table, with some parts of the brush sticking out to the side.

The body maintenance does not just include the outside of the goat. “It might be a TMI (too much information), but you have to clean up in the butts too,” she said.

Once the goats are looking their Sunday best, it is all about how you handle them. Every time the judge sees the goats they must be set up correctly.

The goats need to present a nice square shape, their heads have to be help up high, and the legs must be straight. The showmen could be found adjusting the legs of the animals almost constantly while in the ring.

 To put some pressure on the showmen, judge Constance Wilmoth made the kids go back and forth around the arena to see how they kept the goats in line and move them correctly. She made sure that they could handle all different kinds of goats too, as she had the kids switch goats for a portion of the competition.

Walker said that Wilmoth is one of the more thorough judges she has seen. “All judges are different. She likes to have one- on-one time with the kids to ask them questions,” said Walker.

Judge Constance Wilmoth asks Stella Willis questions about her goat, Niki, at the Crawford County Fair this week.

Wilmoth said over the microphone that she wanted to make sure the showmen know about the goats and their anatomy. When the kids were handling other goats, she would have them come up to her, ask them questions about what they like and dislike about the goats they have, how they could be improved, and asked them anatomy questions.

She said she wanted to see if the kids were “confident in their knowledge.”

After the kids had made plenty of trips around the arena, so many that one goat decided it had walked too far and proceeded to sit down multiple times, it was time to select the winners.

Wilmoth said that the first couple of showmen had great confidence in their knowledge, and every time she looked the goats were set up correctly and they were making eye contact. The rest of the group, however, was incredibly close.

“Any different day they could be in any order,” she said over the microphone.

Speaking about Willis, Wilmoth said she could tell that she had been studying, and that she did a great job handling the goats and answering the questions correctly.

With some more experience, Willis could be getting first or second place ribbons at fairs in years to come.

While she likes competing, what Willis really likes about participating in 4-H is the bonds she makes with her animals.

“My goats have personalities that are really similar to me,” she said. “Sometimes they are energetic, and sometimes they just want to relax with me.”

The competition may have been difficult, but Willis said that wasn’t the hardest part of the week for her.

“It is really tough driving home at night and leaving them here at the fairgrounds,” she said. “This morning when they saw me they jumped on their pens and screamed at the top of their lungs. They were really happy to see me.”

Dvorkin can be reached by email at Gdvorkin@titusvilleherald.com.

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