08/17/2026
We did not write this but we certainly believe this to be true!
Maybe the reason we “don’t have good trainers anymore” is because we stopped letting trainers actually TRAIN.
I had an interesting conversation today with someone looking to bounce marketing ideas around, and somehow we got onto the horse industry. She said, “No one can ride here anymore. There aren’t trainers. It’s either the Olympic riders or the backyard, self-taught people.” She isn’t even from anywhere near me, and that really stuck with me. This isn’t just a local problem anymore.
As a kid, I remember going to the barn every Wednesday, looking at the whiteboard and either being terrified of who I was riding or absolutely thrilled. I remember the teenie-bopper barn girls teaching me how to tack while I tried not to get bit by Valentine walking past him. Then came the 45 minute lesson, where we learned the basics, untacked, and went home feeling like we had just accomplished something huge because we rode a horse.
We had levels. You had to pass them. You didn’t just decide you wanted to jump, so you jumped. I still remember my trainer Shelley and her clipboard. If I saw that clipboard, I knew there was a chance I was about to level up.
Now we’ve turned lessons into customer service. “My kid wants to jump.” Great - but your kid is ripping my saintly horse’s mouth off at the walk, has legs flopping around like Jell-O and can’t balance without stirrups. So no, we aren’t jumping today. We’re working on balance, legs, seat and control until those legs are useless. That’s not being mean. That’s teaching.
And it isn’t just beginners. We have people with money buying barns, running experienced horsemen off because they don’t like being told no, and creating environments where nobody can disagree with the person writing the checks. Money can buy the barn. It cannot buy horsemanship. And horses don’t care who owns the place.
Sometimes the person you need most in your barn is the one willing to tell you what you don’t want to hear.
Because if we keep giving beginners push button horses and rushing them toward jumping, showing, cows, barrels and everything else before they understand how to actually ride, what happens when they grow up and buy the green horse? Who is going to train the next generation of horses if we never trained the next generation of horsemen?
We are so focused on producing the finished product that we’re forgetting how to build it.
Maybe “not yet” needs to become a perfectly acceptable answer again.
Posted by Savannah Simo
