NOTABLE NON PRO

Hard work and a little luck have driven this horsewoman to achieve her goals in and out of the arena.

BY MEGAN ARSZMAN

Throughout her life, if there’s something Lynne Faust wants to accomplish, she figures out a way and tackles it head on. As a young girl, she worked odd jobs and saved up $1,000 to purchase her first pony—a jetblack, Morgan-cross pony. She named him Evander’s Midnight Run, after professional boxer Evander Holyfield, because the pony had a notch in his ear, and she witnessed a harrowing escape by the pony as he was loaded into the trailer at the sale barn.

During college, Faust wanted to ride more frequently, so she founded the University at Albany’s first Intercollegiate Horse Show Association team, so she could compete over fences with her friends. Soon after, Faust discovered reining and learned that the IHSA had a Western division where exhibitors could compete in reining. As a way to experience that discipline, she and her friends also created the Western team for the University at Albany in New York.

It’s said that luck comes to those who work hard. That’s how Faust has found the gold at the end of the rainbow.

Moving East

Faust was born in Utah, a fact she likes to remind connections when they think she’s “from New Jersey.”

“I don’t brag about being from New Jersey,” she laughed. “I remind everyone I was born in Utah; I just got stuck in New Jersey.”

The horsewoman’s parents divorced when she was young, and she and her mom moved to the Garden

State. Her mother worked full time as a nurse, so at a young age Faust learned how to care for herself and the house.

“I was up making my own breakfast, getting my own things ready, going to school, then coming home to do homework and care for the dogs before I went down the street to care for my pony,” Faust said.

While Faust’s family wasn’t involved with horses, her mother had always loved them as much as her daughter. Faust asked for riding lessons, which were English due partly to geography. She leased horses until she could afford her first pony.

“I was very lucky where we lived in New Jersey because while it was a suburb, there was a five-acre farm where I could keep my pony,” she said. “I could walk to school, then I could walk up the street three blocks and take care of him.”

Riding “Evander,” Faust competed in local horse shows and in 4-H for a few years. When she was in high school, her mother purchased a Paint Horse for all-around events, including Western classes. Faust credits the Allentown area for having a variety of equine events near the Horse Park of New Jersey to quench her thirst for anything involving horses.

“I found a fun group of horse people in the area,” she said. “I was showing hunters, but then I had fun team penning on the weekends … well, cow horse people would roll their eyes at how we ‘chased cows’ back then … .”

Faust didn’t stray too far from New Jersey to attend college at the University at Albany where she studied chemistry. She kept her horses near the school and was inspired to start an IHSA team with her friends to support their show habits. A friend gave her a 5-year-old, unraced Thoroughbred to train and compete in the hunter and equitation classes. If Faust wasn’t representing her school in the show ring, she was competing at the larger shows aboard the Thoroughbred in honor of her friend who suffered from breast cancer.

Then reining caught Faust’s eye at an IHSA show. Intrigued by the idea of a different type of adrenaline, she and her friends created the school’s first Western team the next year and competed in both disciplines.

“From then on, I got hooked,” she said.

Doing It Her Way

Upon graduation, Faust sold the Thoroughbred and used the proceeds as a down payment on her first small farm in New York. She moved her Quarter Horse mare, Great Pines Pearl, aka “Pearl,” there and started finding cattle to work and taught herself reining.

Faust joined the Eastern Mountain Ranch Horse Association where she learned about ranch riding, reining, trail and working cows.

“That’s when I learned there was an actual art to working cows—it wasn’t just chasing them into a pen,” she said. “That triggered my interest into the versatility of the sport and the horse. But I still didn’t know that the NRCHA was a thing.”

Faust joined multiple horse groups and did her own research into the ranch horse world. That’s when she discovered a fellow Utah native, Corey Cushing, was an up-and-coming trainer.

“I knew of Corey and his family from back when I lived in Utah,” she said. “So, that spurred me to look more into reined cow horse.”

But she was still lightyears from becoming part of the sport. Faust had returned to school for a masters in organic chemistry and was working as a researcher in a manufacturing lab near her farm. She was working as many hours in the lab as she could, barely able to make ends meet. She couldn’t dream of hitting the show circuit, but she still had her horses and was living the life she wanted.

Faust continued to work up the ranks in the pharmaceutical development field. After about five years, she went to work for a biotech company in Boston, Massachusetts, which was purchased by a larger pharmaceutical company. That’s what set the wheels in motion for the life Faust had dreamed of living.

“That was the event in my career that kind of tipped the scale for me, and I was finally able to get financially ahead a little and was promoted from associate director to director,” she said. “I was able to finally not live paycheck to paycheck and I can start living my dreams a little bit.”

Throughout the transition, Pearl offered Faust solace from the rigors of the lab life and constant financial strain. She experimented with breeding, which was a learning experience for the horsewoman. The second breeding led to a little ranch-type Paint

Horse that served as an introduction to boxing and truly learning how to work cattle.

When Faust was offered another promotion, it came with the best benefit: the ability to live anywhere if it was near an airport. Following a bad breakup, Faust packed up and joined a friend near the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Living out of her trailer’s living quarters, she parked in Craig Johnson’s driveway for almost six months.

“Finally, being down here in Texas I can be closer to cow horse, closer to the events and everything I’ve wanted to do for the last decade since I took that first run on a reining horse at the intercollegiate show,” Faust said. “But I knew I didn’t have the horsepower. I was humbled very quickly to the level of horsepower you need in Texas.”

Faust knew it would take time to get the right kind of horsepower to be competitive at the level she wanted reach, but she continued to learn however she could with her homebred horses she hauled from New York.

Turning Texan

Faust absorbed as much as she could taking lessons from esteemed horsemen such as Johnson and Tom Neel. Johnson gave Faust a breeding to Sailing Smart when she first arrived, and that produced Pearl’s third and final foal.

“My mare unexpectedly died three days after the foal was born and that was devastating,” Faust recalled. “That was the horse that took me from middle school through every life change I’ve ever had.”

Fortunately, Faust still has that red filly, which is now 5 years old and her mount at Stock Horse of Texas and American Quarter Horse Association ranch versatility events.

“She’s certainly more talented [than her mother], but she definitely won’t ever be a great cow horse,” Faust said. “But she’s solid in the reining and if you want to talk about ranch riding and ranch trail deluxe, she is.”

Faust’s boyfriend, Jarrett Webb, introduced her to a fellow Utahn. It was like she was meeting a celebrity when she shook hands with Cushing. Then she also met Chris Dawson, who helped her try out a few different horses and purchase Smart Lil Brooksinic, aka “Pink,’ from Emily Kent as her first true entry in NRCHA events. She made connections with Lee and Ashley Deacon, with whom she still trains. She took up roping as a hobby during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now adds that to the list of equine activities she does with Pink and Webb. All the while she continues to climb the corporate ladder.

“I grew up having to push myself if I wanted something,” Faust said. “I knew I better keep good grades, or I didn’t get to ride. As I got older, I knew if I wanted to do something I’d have to financially afford to do it. That’s just how it was.

“To this day, I push myself in my career because I wanted to be an executive director in my 30s, and I want to be a vice president before I’m 40 and right now I’m 37 and I should be getting my VP promotion by next year if everything goes well,” she added. “There’s a part of that I just push myself and my career, a lot of it was to pay off my student-loan debt and everything I had to take out to get me where I’m at. That’s what slowed down my being able to show and do the things I wanted to do now.”

This mindset culminated to Faust and Lee Deacon making a huge splash last year aboard Seven S Party Favor at the DT Horses Western Derby in 2022.

“My hard work has given me the satisfaction of knowing where I came from and where I am,” she said. “Shoot, up to this year and having that yellow horse is a dream come true. I just wanted to have a good enough horse to show and keep learning. It was just icing on the cake for both Lee and I to make the finals—that was never in the plan, and I didn’t care what was in the plan, that’s for God to ultimately decide. My career growth and my personal motivation as a rider to always push myself to get better and keep learning. It’s just amazing and a true blessing everything that has happened.”