Because of her personal experience with her mare, Dinky, Shayla knows exactly how it feels to be frustrated with a horse and unconfident. “My whole goal of becoming a clinician is so that I can help people. I understand what it’s like to have a problem horse and not know what to do with it. I want to help other people get results with their horses like Clinton helped me,” she says.
While in the Academy, Shayla got a taste for how fulfilling it can be to help others succeed with their horsemanship. Lesson days, when she’d get to spend an entire day showing Academy Horse owners what their horses had learned while in training with her, have been highlights of her time in the program. Those lessons made all the hard work she put into training the horses and the challenges she helped them through worthwhile.”I can remember getting this one Thoroughbred in who bucked and bucked and bucked when I first saddled him and then he ran and ran and ran around the arena when I turned him out to get used to wearing the saddle. I was sitting there thinking that training him was going to be
“I can remember getting this one Thoroughbred in who bucked and bucked and bucked when I first saddled him and then he ran and ran and ran around the arena when I turned him out to get used to wearing the saddle. I was sitting there thinking that training him was going to be nightmare, but two weeks into the program, he became a different horse. He relaxed and got really quiet. That change in the horses is what makes me love what I do. You’d see how the horses are when they arrive at the ranch for training, and you can understand why their owners have lost hope or don’t have any confidence left. When they come to pick their horses up on their lesson days, I´m standing on the horses’ backs and cracking a whip. It’s an amazing transformation,” Shayla says.