Andrea Hale

Andrea Hale has loved horses her whole life and started in a small, local lesson program near her home in Audubon, PA in the mid-1980s. It was a program grounded in horsemanship and in properly educating its riders, and it shaped her from the beginning.

When her family moved to Plano, she grew up in the hunter and jumper ring at Willow Bend with Mary Phelps, and in 1999 she competed at the North American Young Riders Championships on the Zone 7 team with her horse Jesse. She also rode in programs built the other way, where riders were moved up on height rather than on skill and questions were not especially welcome. She learned what that costs a rider, and she has never forgotten it.

The showing is not what taught her the most. She lost her first pony a few months after her family bought her, and the veterinarian who could not explain why began taking her along on farm calls so she could ask better questions. She has been asking them ever since. Her husband jokes that she knows something is wrong before anyone else in the barn sees it. It is not a gift. It is hours.

40 years later she has ridden, competed, coached, and run her own boarding and training facility. She is also a career classroom educator, which is the part of her background that shapes how the school is put together.

As Education and Program Coordinator, Andrea designs the riding school's curriculum and the standards behind every level. Riders are placed where they actually are, they move up when they have earned it, and they are told why and not only what. Horsemanship is part of every level, because a rider who can get around a course and cannot tell when their horse is off has learned half the job.

She also builds the parts of the program that happen outside the ring: clinics, guest instructors, community events, and the written material families take home. Parents hear from her about what their rider is working on and what comes next.

Every question is welcome in her ring, every time. She is building the kind of program she started in.

Andrea is the author of Hard Truths, Soft Hands and the founder of Breakaway Equine Education. At home she has Graham, her show horse, and Cooper, a retired off-track thoroughbred.