The start to this beautiful (crazy) journey...

It all started in 2018 around Samuelle’s 8th birthday, by chance, with a birthday GROUPON gift sent by uncle Sam from Belgium, for three horseback riding lessons at Canterbury Manor Stables in Zionsville, IN 

Samuelle had been keeping us busy and avidly trying all sports: soccer, ballet, gymnastics, volleyball… We made room for a session of horseback riding to honor Uncle Sam’s gift. We had never heard of the stables and were surprised to find this tucked away manor in the heart of Zionsville, IN. It felt rather surreal when we pulled up! We were welcomed by a couple of sheep and a peacock, then kindly told she could look for a helmet that fit in the bin and go find Roman, the good old boy she’d be riding that day! Made for a dreamy experience.



"Roman this, Roman that, Roman all the time."  We couldn’t hear the end of it. The next week couldn’t come fast enough…

By Christmas 2019 the whole family had pitched in to make her dream of owning her own (second hand) saddle come true -- and then just like that, without a fair warning: our lives were about to take a drastic turn. The pandemic hit!

In 2020 all other extracurricular activities and sports fell off the schedule and were organically replaced by additional horseback riding lessons (where the 6 feet social distancing was kind of a given!)  When Christmas rolled around we surprised Samuelle with the lease of Rooster, aka Be Sorta Bad. A horse she’d by then had been riding for the past few months. Rooster wasn’t a very popular horse at the barn back then. No one wanted to ride him as he was known to be a "stinker" in the nicest of terms: bucking and rolling with his riders…

But her trainer Sandra Brady, thought they’d make a good pair and Samuelle was up for the challenge!

Sam, being 10 years old back then, of course was tickled by the fact that Rooster is the grandson of Secretariat himself!

The perfect storm: Months of hard work for those two to synchronize (and for Rooster to accept his new rider,) but because of (or thanks to) the pandemic, they practiced on average 5 days a week together and felt ready to tackle a show season together as our travels abroad were canceled due to COVID. For a lack of better things to do, we kept busy by entering them in most local Canterbury and "Wild Air" 2021 horse shows.

As a result of a successful show season, Samuelle was awarded USHJA high point scorer for Zone 5, second to Canterbury rider Ashley Vaught, whom had been mentoring Sam through the rough beginnings of her lease with Rooster. Both riders (thanks to a computer glitch) won the USHJA Outreach Golden Backstage Pass and were invited to compete at the USHJA National Championships in Las Vegas, in November 2021! #ushja #goldenbackstagepass #USHJAoutreach 

The start of it all...