MOUNT GILEAD — When thinking of horsemanship, one tends to think of riders practicing maneuvers or engaging in spirited competition. The Internet probably isn’t the first thought that comes to mind.
But the Internet has recently given an unexpected boost to the profile of Morrow County horsemanship expert Stacy Westfall, sending her all the way to Hollywood to make an appearance on Ellen Degeneres’ popular daytime talk show.
“The day after I was on ‘Ellen,’ my Web site got 600,000 hits,” said Westfall, who described the recent events as a whirlwind.
Westfall, who was born in Westfield, Mass., and grew up in Maine, ended up in north central Ohio after meeting and marrying her husband, Jesse Westfall, at the University of Findlay. Findlay was her choice for college, thanks to a math teacher in high school who convinced her not to settle for a calculated career but to pursue her dreams, which involved working with horses. UF has a nationally recognized equine program, and her training led to a career in equine competition and training.
Westfall has competed in reining for years, and is excited that it stands a good chance of being added as competitive sport to the 2012 Olympics. But, considering that loose reins demonstrate control in riding, Westfall wanted to get away from pulling on the horse’s mouth with the reins.
“I was trying to figure out how to move my cues away from that and into my legs, my voice and my body,” Westfall said.
She began trying out different leg positions, teaching the horse to understand how to move based on the placement and pressure the rider uses with her legs. Spending approximately 800 hours to perfect this approach, Westfall eventually eliminated the bridle completely, and refined her verbal cues down to only about three. All other instructions are conveyed to the horse through leg pressure and position.
“My mom is a teacher, my aunt is a teacher and my uncle is a teacher,” Westfall said, showing that the gift for instructing others runs through her family.
Competing led to traveling expositions where she would explain how she did many of the things she did. This, in turn, led to the instructional DVDs that Westfall has been selling at her Web site, www.westfallhorsemanship.com.
Her first video was titled “How Does She Do That?” and it featured demonstrations of bridleless competition riding. The title came from the fact that Westfall was constantly being asked how she did bridleless riding. Considering that bridleless riding is an advanced achievement, Westfall has also produced a number of other videos with training tips and techniques.
One of the videos from Westfall’s Web site “went viral” earlier this year, as people passed the link on to their friends via e-mail. The video shows Westfall riding not only bridleless but bareback as well, with the popular Tim McGraw song “Live Like You Were Dying” as background music. The Web site crashed at the point when they were getting in excess of 1 million hits per week. One person who saw the video and was impressed was television talk show host Ellen Degeneres, who promptly arranged for Westfall to appear on her show.
“They contacted us on a Tuesday, and on Thursday they had the video clip on the show,” Westfall said.
Less than two weeks later, she and her family were in California to tape their appearance. Two segments of the show were devoted to Westfall, including three minutes of riding footage done at the L.A. Equestrian Center, drawn from about an hour and a half of footage. Westfall was especially pleased when Degeneres volunteered to take Westfall’s horse, Roxy, for a spin.
After a spring which has seen her on the road every weekend for the last two months, Westfall is looking forward to spending some time at home over the next couple of months, doing some horsemanship clinics, personal teaching, and the grand opening of a tack store in Mount Gilead on May 30. It will feature all kinds of horse training equipment as well as Westfall’s videos for sale. More videos are being filmed soon and will be available by mid-summer.
