Meet the Trainer

Philosophy -- I have spent many years teaching and have found that a personal touch goes a long way. I know each and every student by name, and I tailor their lessons to their individual needs. For this reason, I do not offer group lessons. Too many times, students in a group lesson get lost in the crowd. Some students get bored because the pace of the lesson is too slow, while others struggle to keep up. By working with students one-on-one or in pairs, I can move at the appropriate pace for that student or pair of students. Nobody gets run through an assembly line.

How I got started -- I started riding when I was about 9 years old. Our family had recently moved and I was a shy kid and did not have a lot of friends at the new school. My mom and dad occasionally took me trail riding at Valley Mount Ranch, and I loved it. I signed up for Girl Scout badge programs there and became hooked. I then began volunteering on the weekends. The other volunteers, my new barn friends, and I did all sorts of jobs including grooming, cleaning the barn, walking pony rides around the track, helping people on and off horses when they came to trail ride and riding the horses down to the creek for water as there was not running water near the barn back then. In return, we would sometimes get to ride on a trail or in the field.

Once I began junior high school, I worked at J.M. Pierce stables across the street from my school in exchange for hunter/jumper lessons. In high school, my parents decided to help pay for my lessons so I would have more time to study. I then took lessons at Wessels Stables in Weldon Springs, all the time still volunteering and riding horses at Valley Mount as well.

I wanted a horse, but my parents said I would have to buy it and be able to support it myself. So junior year of high school, I got a job at Valvoline Instant Oil Change, where I could make more money than I could at the barn, and it was closer to my house. Right after I graduated from high school, I bought Forever Velvet, a.k.a. "Zema", from a friend. Zema was a 15-year-old Appaloosa gelding. I arranged to keep him at my friend's family farm in Jonesburg. I kept this a secret from my parents, but it was not much more than a few weeks into college that they found out and Zema was shipped to Kentucky to go to college with me. So you could say that Zema has a college education, too! So that is the start of my horse habit. I still have Zema, I still show him, and he still teaches many of my students the joys of riding.