On Centre: Bald Eagle Area

Fourth-grader tames mustang

Chris Rosenblum

Many have Mustangs in their garages. Brooke Myers has the real thing at home, a yearling named Jacuzzi.

Photo provided

Brooke Myers, with her horse, Jacuzzi, was named reserve grand champion in the youth division at the Eastern Stampede event of the Extreme Mustang Makeover, a series of competitions for trainers.

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Not only that, she tamed him in just 90 days.

Few fourth-graders can make the same claim.

Her patience and hard work paid off recently at the Eastern Stampede event of the Extreme Mustang Makeover, a series of competitions for trainers given three months to tame western mustangs belonging to the federal government. The nonprofit Mustang Heritage Foundation sponsors the series to find permanent homes for the horses.

Myers, who lives near Port Matilda, brought Jacuzzi to Murfreesboro, Tenn., and the duo held up in the ring. As the youngest, at 9, of the 28 competitors in the youth division, Brooke finished the preliminaries in third place, more than enough to qualify for the freestyle finals.

After her artistic routine, again leading her horse by the halter, she ended up reserve grand champion for the division. For her efforts, she received a $1,000 scholarship and other prizes.

She could be the youngest makeover competitor ever; the foundation said there may have been one or two 9-yearolds before.

Regardless, her mother was thrilled.

Suzanne Myers, a faculty member at Penn State’s Animal Diagnostics Lab, trains mustangs at her stables off Shady Dell Road in Worth Township. Last year, she was named champion of the Midwest Mustang Challenge, a similar competition sponsored by the foundation in Wisconsin. But to Tennessee, she went only as a spectator.

Myers had reason to cheer beyond her daughter’s success. Her co-worker, Rhiannon Schneider, 25, and her stable manager, Lauren Sarnowski, 22, won prizes for showing a pair of 4-year-olds, Durango and Kerwin.

Schneider and Sarnowski placed first and second, respectively, in the adult amateur division preliminaries, a quarter point apart but 10 points ahead of everyone else. Unlike the youth, they were judged on their riding, but they completed the same test of releasing a mustang and then peacefully retrieving it.

“Essentially, they’re looking for the connection between the horse and the handler,” Suzanne Myers said.

The finals, in which scores reset to zero, saw Schneider place sixth and Sarnowski 10th.

“We were very happy to come home with three top tens,” Myers said.

That’s not all they brought back.

Competitions end with auctions, the mustangs adopted by bidders. Schneider’s went for $950 — to her, bought partly with her $550 prize. Sarnowski used her $250 check, plus a loan from Myers, to place her winning $550 bid.

As for Brooke, she was allowed to buy Jacuzzi before the auction for the government’s standard $125 adoption fee. They’re still together, building trust daily, the promise of a deep friendship ahead.

“There’s something about mustangs,” Suzanne Myers said. “They definitely create a bond that’s unusual.”

Chris Rosenblum writes a weekly column about happenings in the Bald Eagle area. Send him news at crosenbl@centredaily.com or call 231-4620.