Our Pack
Tessa Sternbach
Tessa is the founder and owner of Ruff Life AVL and has been training since 2014 as a Certified Professional Dog Trainer, Knowledge Assessed (CPDT-KA). Her team is here to help with any training need ranging from basic obedience and housebreaking to complex behavioral consultations related to dog or people aggression, separation anxiety, and more.
Adrienne Ratti
Adrienne is a native of Michigan and came to Asheville in 2010. She has been a part of the Ruff Life team since October of 2020. Adrienne has enjoyed being part of all aspects of Ruff Life from Socialization, and working with Board & Train clients, to caring for boarding dogs as well as her current role as manager. In her spare time, Adrienne's favorite thing to do is hike with her Australian Cattle Dogs, Sevro & Cacti. Working with dogs has become one of her passions. Not only is it rewarding to help people and their pets but the dogs remind her to live in the moment, be patient and move on from mistakes.
Ashley Dinges
New to the Asheville area, Ashley's training experience before Ruff Life was limited to the work she did with her own dog, Althea. Althea was a troubled child, and after years of working with her and self-education, Ashley knew that she wanted to help others gain the same relationship with their dog as she had created with her own. Her goal is to give owners the tools they need to create long-lasting, healthy relationships and great communication skills between themselves and their furry family members. She highly recommends checking out the book Canine Body Language By Brenda Aloff to understand more about dog language.
Noah Young
Noah is part of the administrative staff. He loves working at Ruff Life because we do not discriminate against dogs or people, and we work with all dogs to get them to a better place in their training and to get them in a place where life isn't as scary. Outside of Ruff Life, he loves to travel and dabble in photography.
Chris Wesselman
Chris is a transplant from Cincinnati, where he previously spent over 20 years performing, creating, and producing live theatre and events (and maybe, just maybe, you can still find him in Season 4, Episode 1 of a certain series streaming on HBOMax. Only Tessa knows.) BUT NOW, he happily looks after your pups as the Socialization Supervisor here at Ruff Life. What happened in between? Did I achieve Nirvana? Go climb Kilimanjaro? Well, that's a story for another bio... (But mostly it was COVID stuff).
Kalyn Wilson
Kalyn is part of our socialization staff and has been a member of the pack since June of 2022. Even though she is just getting started at Ruff Life, she has lived here in AVL her whole life. She loves working at Ruff Life because she gets to be surrounded by the two things she loves most: dogs, and people who love dogs as much as she does.
Mary Kelly
Mary joined the Ruff Life Team in early fall 2022 after apprenticing over the summer. She is native to Connecticut but currently resides in Brevard with her fiancé, 2 cats, and Borzoi. She is an avid equestrian and Foxhunt with Green Creek Hounds in Tryon. Before coming to Ruff Life, she left ER vet medicine to pursue her passion for behavior, training, and working / sporting dogs. She loves Ruff Life because of the variety of training cases we see and the difference she feels we make in the Asheville dog community. She loves meeting owners and helping them work to build a better bond with their pup and introduce them to new skills and methods to better their training at home.