Synda has been involved with horses her whole life. She grew up riding her family’s horses on old canal banks and got into team sorting and barrel racing when she was older. Her grandfather was a trainer and often fixed problem horses and bought horses, retrained them and then sold them to good homes. Synda was by his side every chance she had, soaking up his knowledge.
“Anytime he had a good pony or a quiet horse, he would have me hop on and ride. He trained quite a few horse and mule teams to pull wagons, too. When I was 2, I was driving the wagon around,” Synda remembers.
She trained her first horse on her own when she was 14. Blondy, a black Tennessee Walker, was an ideal student and a great confidence builder. “I got her when she was a year and a half old and did all the training on her myself. She turned out to be the best mare,” Synda says.
Encouraged by her success with Blondy, Synda began taking on colts to start. In 2015, she got a particularly spooky colt that bucked her off. She decided to explore different training approaches to get through to him. “I knew my grandpa’s program well, but I didn’t understand why he did the things he did. I just knew how he did it,” Synda says. “When I found Clinton’s videos on YouTube, his step-by-step instructions made sense to me and answered my question about why I needed to do something.”
Synda used the Method to train the colt, and in a short amount of time, he went from reactive and squirrelly to calm and confident. From that point on, Synda was hooked on the Method and used it to train all her horses.
As she got deeper into Downunder Horsemanship, Synda dreamed of attending the Academy, but it seemed out of reach. With her friends’ encouragement and the support of her family, she was finally able to become a Method Ambassador.
“I love working with horses and watching them progress,” Synda says. “It’s fun to help people learn the Method and fine tune their skills. I enjoy watching light bulbs go off for them and seeing them get excited about training their horses.”