Working with horses, a passion
My final convergence journalism project.
Working with horses, a passion from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.
For Suzanne Myers, waiting for the end of work at her job isn’t just a matter of wanting some time to relax; it’s looking forward to being at the part-time business she operates — Myers Stables. For her, working with horses is a passion and lifelong dream.
From a very young age, Myers was adamant about training the horses she would compete with in 4-H events and began to develop her own techniques as she learned from good horsemen and horsewomen.
Myers developed into a successful horsewoman, eventually opening Myers Stables in Port Matilda with her husband, Glenn Myers, in 2001. She started her own training program called Next Level Horsemanship about a year ago. She accomplished this while continuing to work full time at Penn State’s Animal Diagnostic Lab and being the mother to an 8-year-old daughter, Brooke Myers, who also rides and has begun to train her own horses.
Suzanne Myers has been training horses professionally for 20 years. Developing the Next Level Horsemanship program allowed her to market her business on a broader scale.
“The decision to train professionally was one that I made a long time ago. It’s truly my passion without a doubt and it’s all consuming in my mind,” she said. “I live, breathe and sleep wanting to work with horses.”
Last year Myers earned national attention in the horse community when she won the 2008 Mustang Challenge the first time she entered the competition.
Trainers competing in the Challenge are given 90 days to take an unbroken mustang and train it to allow a rider on its back and to perform basic maneuvers. The mustangs are then sold at an auction. The sale proceeds benefit the Mustang Heritage Foundation. Myers used her winnings to purchase Jazz, the mustang she competed with in the event.
“To not hear your number called until the top 3 was just amazing. To think that after all of the hard work, time and consistency that it might actually pay off was just very exciting,” she said. “And then they announced the second place winner and we knew that we had done it.”
Following the challenge, Myers became involved with a trainer incentive program, which places mustangs into successful adoptive homes by first gentling them with a trainer, through the Mustang Heritage Foundation.
“It was a great learning experience for us and a great networking tool as well. We’ve met a lot of people, different trainers from across the country,” she said. “It’s been a very good thing both on a personal level and as a trainer and as a professional to have those contacts in the industry.”
Handling mustangs during the training process is different than dealing with a typical horse — their instincts for survival have been honed over several years, Myers said.
“This difference primarily addresses the need for us to spend more time desensitizing these horses to us and the things we’re using around them in an effort to retrain their flight instinct and to get them to understand that we are not going to hurt them,” she said.
Myers says she hopes to move her business into a full-time venture within the next year, hosting more clinics and taking on more clients.
“We’re in a stage of aggressive growth right now and we’re doing a lot more clinics this year than we did last year and hopefully next year we’ll even bring it to a more far-reaching national scale,” she said.
As for how she juggles working a full-time job, being a wife and mother all while running a successful business on the side, Myers just brushes it off.
“Sometimes it’s exhausting,” she said, “but you just do it.”
Daughter follows in mother’s footsteps
Brooke Myers, 8, is already training and riding horses and even plans to compete this summer with the mustang her mother trained, Jazz.
Daughter follows in mother’s footsteps from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.
Childhood memories
Like her daughter, Suzanne Myers became interested in riding and training horses when she was a little girl.
Childhood memories from Katharine Lackey on Vimeo.
