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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