Following In Their Footsteps
Vicki Humphrey And Jessica Clinton
Following In Their Footsteps …
Vicki Humphrey And Jessica Clinton by Mary Kirkman It was not a foregone conclusion that Jessica Clinton would be a horse trainer. She was her mother’s daughter— which meant not that she would choose horses, but that she might pursue art. Standout trainer Vicki Humphrey, now a fixture in the Arabian show ring, might appear to have been born to the saddle, but the truth is that well into a career that has collected national championships the way some people collect stamps, she entertained the thought of being an artist instead. That “Jesse” grew up in a horse-loving family is old news. Not only is her mother a professional trainer, but her father, Jim Clinton, bred hundreds of Arabians and HalfArabians. Her halfsisters Suzie and Cindy are both involved in the breed, and her older sister Lea is a champion juvenile and amateur rider. Jesse, the youngest, has loved horses all her life, but in the beginning, she couldn’t have cared less about the show ring. “When I was a kid, I really didn’t have much to do with the horses at all, riding-wise,” she recalls. “I just liked handling them and being around them.” While Lea, who is three years older, was rising through the juvenile ranks, Jesse had another agenda. “I would just ride bareback at a dead run through the forest,” she says. If it scared her mother to death, Humphrey never said anything. She’d enjoyed the same sensations when she was a child. But by the time Jesse decided that maybe she’d get interested in
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showing, Lea had first call on the good horses. “She always felt like she was getting leftovers,” Vicki Humphrey recalls. “She got really nice horses, but Lea already had won something big on them. I think it kind of dimmed her interest in the competition, not because she couldn’t compete with Lea, but because something always had come before her.”
“I was trying, really trying, not to be a horse trainer,” she smiles. “But you know what, I think it was really inevitable.”
Jesse agrees with that, but now sees the silver lining in the cloud. “I think as a result of me showing the lesser horses all of the time, I learned a little bit more about the process of actually training instead of just riding a finished show horse,” she observes. Still, it didn’t spark any thought of training as a career. “At Youth Nationals, they do those questionnaires, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ I remember specifically that one year I wrote ‘not a horse trainer.’” That feeling remained with her for years, as she went to college for fine arts and painting. She continued to ride, and when she aged out of the youth division, she rode as an amateur. Eventually, she found herself training on the side and keeping up a pretty substantial show schedule. “I was trying, really trying, not to be a horse trainer,” she smiles. “But you know what, I think it was really inevitable.” In fact, it happened gradually, but Humphrey remembers a turning point. “It was a funny transformation for her,” she says. “It took Lea going off to school. When that
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Vicki Humphrey And Jessica Clinton happened, Jesse started getting new horses, fresh horses to ride. And that’s when I saw the difference in her, that she started wanting to do it herself and train them herself instead of saying, ‘Mom fix this, Mom do this.’ She started to say, ‘I think I can get this figured out.’ “Never, never had she talked about wanting to train horses,” Humphrey adds. “She was going to school. She was an art major.” Jesse was 22 when she made the commitment to train horses full-time, and her reasoning was clear. “I find that with anything, I’m a super competitive person,” she says. “I realized that I just couldn’t give up the horses; that wasn’t an option. I couldn’t be as good or as dedicated about my artwork as I wanted to be, and so I’d just rather not do it at all than do it halfway.” Even so, again like her mother, she hasn’t wholly given up on the idea of her art. “It would be nice to do that later,” she admits. Sometime. Her move from very good amateur to trainer was eased by her prior experience developing horses part-time as an amateur. The transition appeared seamless, as she and her mother added professional relationship to their mother/daughter dynamic. “Anybody that’s around a lot can tell you that we definitely get into it,” Jesse grins. “I mean, I ask for help and we disagree and we fight and bicker, but we’re all good at the end of the day. My mom is the best person about never holding a grudge. She could be ready to kill me, and then five minutes later she’s over it and completely forgotten about it and moved on. “We get along really good,” she says again, and then adds casually, “but it’s kind of funny. [Around the barn] we actually have a code word for my mother. It’s HRH, Her Royal Highness.” She gets serious again. Growing up in a trainer’s family, she had a clear view of the job’s reality before she ever chose it for herself. “I found out at a very early age that training horses has very little to do with training horses, and so much is being—well, being everything to your
clients. People pay a lot of money to do this hobby that is our industry, and they expect a lot in return.”
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She had to accept that working with humans is as much a part of running a barn as working with horses is. And that, she concedes, may have been part of the reason she resisted becoming a professional for several years; she loved training horses, but working with humans was a different prospect. In the end, she just followed her mother’s lead. “As I grew up and matured, I realized I had to handle it,” she says. “I am a very realistic person; I knew exactly what I was getting myself into, becoming a trainer. Now I appreciate every part of it, and my Mom—she’s just awesome. She’s always there for everybody. I learned a lot about dealing with people from her.” Humphrey remembers her own emotions when Jesse decided that she wanted to be a trainer. “I was like, no way. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody—no, you don’t—please finish school. I said, ‘I’ll hire you if you finish school. But, you’ve got to have something to fall back on, because this isn’t a forever job. This is until your body hurts.’ “Jesse was always the curl-up-and-read kid; she didn’t play sports in school,” she continues parenthetically. “Lea was on the track team, and Jesse was ‘you’ve got to be kidding me.’ This is a physically challenging job for anybody—certainly for women—and Jesse’s kind of teeny-tiny. So, I’m saying, ‘You don’t want to manhandle horses for the rest of your life. Go get a high-paying job and then you can afford to pay whoever you want to train your horses.’ But she absolutely has a connection with horses like nobody else I’ve ever known. I’m lucky enough to have the best trainer I could hire—there isn’t a better one out there. She’s so connected to the horses; she’s quiet, and she gets it done and it’s pretty amazing.”
Did it feel good, though, having her daughter follow in her footsteps? “Absolutely,” she says. “That’s when I started to say things like, ‘Oh, this is a terrible idea, it’s a wonderful idea.’ Because it’s so fun to work together, and so fun to have family around. I love it.” Humphrey laughs at their training relationship now. “Every once in a while she’ll say, ‘help me with this horse,’ or ‘what would you do?’ or ‘what would you change?’ But she’s very independent. Every once in awhile, when I’m done with my list and she’s not done with all of her horses, I’ll say, ‘I’ll work that horse for you,’ and she’ll say, ‘Don’t mess it up, Mom.’ She’s gained a great deal of confidence.” The confidence is built not only on experience, but on success. Despite the fact that she was late to the party in getting serious about competition, Jesse put together an impressive resumé of national wins, starting in walk/ trot and moving on to equitation and adult titles in English pleasure, park and native costume. (She is a seven-time national champion in costume.) She also accounted for the Platinum Performance High Point Award with Bey Berry Love, with its $5,000 check. And in her first season as a pro, she came home with two national championships and four top tens, and coached her riders to two national reserve championships and a host of top tens. Since then, the titles have multiplied. One, however, stands out in her mind and always will be special: her last national championship as an amateur, in 2007. She had selected, purchased and trained the horse—the 5-year-old Half-Arabian mare, Excels High Fashion—herself. The pair took on all comers in the U.S.
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Vicki Humphrey And Jessica Clinton Looking at what other trainers’ kids have faced when they moved straight from juvenile competition to professional, she ref lects that there again, taking longer to do that probably made it easier for her. “I had a few amateur years in there,” she points out. But being second trainer in the barn to one of the most successful performance trainers in the industry presents its own set of challenges, or at least it did at first. “Sometimes people say, ‘Well, I know you’re training my horse, Jessica, but I’d like your mom to show this one because of her name,’” she says. “Which is, sadly, true some of the time. The first couple of years I trained, it was kind of like that.”
Futurity (Tempani), along with a top ten in the HalfArabian English Futurity (Afire Siren). So, when regarding her career, what does she want for the future? “Every day I feel like I get better, and that’s what I want,” she says. “I never want to think that I’m there. I want to be working towards a goal of just always
continuing to reinvent and get better and be the best. I’m so competitive—I don’t like to lose.” She struggles to find the words. “I’m not ‘not humble.’ I’m not blind, but I’m super competitive.” Her mother is a little more specific. “Other than the year that I worked for Onyx, I have always had a public training barn,” Humphrey says. “I want Jesse to have a secure world where she’s not moving from barn to barn, like so many trainers have to do. They get a great setup, and then they go out of business and they have to move, and they have to uproot their children. I don’t want that life for her. So, the fact that she can work for me forever is exactly why I set it up this way for myself; I didn’t want to move my kids around.”
She shrugs. She gets it; it’s a fact of life. “I didn’t really have a name for myself yet. But I think I’m starting to grow out of that a little bit. I have a great—really great—group of clients that put a lot of trust in me and let me show their horses.”
National Championship Park AAOTR, and if ever there was an indicator that Jessica Clinton was ready to be a professional, that was it. The achievement remains not only a milestone for her, but also is one of her mother’s favorite memories (along with Lea’s unanimous national championship in equitation). Last February, she was awarded APAHA’s Rising Star Award for 2011. It is fair to ask if, as a juvenile, amateur or professional, she ever felt extra pressure as the child of a trainer. Overall, she says, not much. Yes, some—but not what one might think, that she was expected to perform to a higher standard. “As a youth rider, it was probably the worst, showing equitation with kids in the barn that showed equitation,” she recalls. “It was like a ‘that’s not fair’ kind of thing—and it was predominately mothers more than kids. The kids and I got along fine, but there was always tension from the other mothers and that used to stress me out a little bit. As an amateur, it was fine. I don’t remember feeling like any extra pressure, besides the pressure I put on myself.”
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An example of that came at last year’s U.S. Nationals, when Jacques LaPointe and Candace Avery entrusted her with their 4-year-old mare Princess Of Baske in the country English pleasure junior class. It was an effective match; Princess Of Baske, with Jessica Clinton up, was named unanimous champion. “It was a pretty awesome feeling,” Jesse remembers. “I finally got to do it and prove myself. I never get my expectations up because it is so easy to be disappointed, but I really wanted it, and when it all came together, the stars aligned and it was a pretty amazing feeling.” Any evaluation of the show has to show that Jessica Clinton’s career is progressing nicely. Sure, her mother was in the saddle for the barn’s big guns, Mandalay Bay (a fourth consecutive U.S. National Park Championship) and Bonfire ROF (U.S. National Champion in Country English Pleasure), last year at Nationals. But Clinton was on board for Princess Of Baske, and nabbed U.S. National Reserve Championships in Native Costume (HL Sanction) and the Country English Pleasure
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Vicki Humphrey And Jessica Clinton
“I never want to think that I’m there. I want to be working towards a goal of just always continuing to reinvent and get better and be the best.”
The stability comes with drawbacks, she concedes. “There are struggles that you go through, owning your own business and not having near the salary most of the time that you would have if someone were to pay you. And having to do all the work, all the business side of it.” She focuses on countering the weak spots. “[When you’re on your own], you’re not locked into somebody’s breeding program,” she says. “You’re training everything that comes along that you can make a living doing. So, I’ve been working hard lately with the clients we have that are breeding, and getting them geared in the right direction so that the foals they have that are coming up can be—hopefully—superstars for
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Jesse. And then, also, I have my own breeding that I’m doing, so that there are always going to be horses coming along that are planned ahead, so we don’t have to pull them out of the woodwork. That makes the trainer’s life much easier.”
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Vicki Humphrey And Jessica Clinton
She laughs. Of course, Jesse’s presence in the barn offers an opportunity for her to slow down, to take more time off, to relax more. “I’m sure I will at some point,” she nods. “But it’s way out there. I thought it would be sooner, but I think, because Jesse’s here, I take more breaks and more vacations.”
Although retirement is still slated for some time down the years from now, that does not mean that Humphrey’s focus will remain the same now that her daughter is on staff. “I really like kids, you know,” she says. “If I never showed again, I would not miss it for a minute, but I really like putting the kids in the ring. That’s what I’d rather do than be training a horse. So it works great for Jesse.” If Jesse feels the weight of that responsibility, she doesn’t show it. Her mother has been a good role model all along, she figures; there’s no reason to change that estimation now. Trying to quantify what she has learned from
Humphrey in addition to horsemanship, she points to attitude and perspective. “She’s so laid back,” she says. “And she’s not a super emotional person. You work so hard for one moment in the show ring, and then it’s over, and it’s like, ‘okay, let’s work another year to do it again.’ It is just a moment. What I’ve learned from her is that it’s not necessarily the ribbon. It’s more than that.” That’s not to discount the value of a win or a good show, she emphasizes. She is just seeing beyond it. “Since I was a kid, this farm has been like a family,” she says. “I know that’s super corny to say, but we get involved with the clients’ lives and their kids’ lives. That’s important.” n
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