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How do I become a racehorse trainer?
I am a 16 year old girl in Phoenix. All of my life I have wanted to train thoroughbred race horses. I am good at betting and can tell which 43 horses will come in the money most of the time. How do I achieve my dream? I have always loved watching racing and have been riding and around horses since I was 5. Right now, the plan is to go to Colorado State and get an Equine Science degree. Is this the best plan? Thanks for all your help!
To become a licensed racehorse trainer, you need to pass the knowledge test for licensing in the state in which you train, and pass the background check (basically a check to verify that you have no felony convictions on your record, that you have no obvious link to organized crime, and nothing else that would make you vulnerable to manipulation of your horses to fix races).
A college degree in equine science won’t hurt you, but it won’t necessarily help you. Many successful trainers, including hall-of-famers, have no college credentials.
What is important is the ability to persuade people who have the money to spend on racehorses that you should be training for them. To that extent, you need to be comfortable talking to and advising people who may be highly educated in the field in which they made their money, who are ambitious, who may be concerned with status, and who have to have a fair amount of discretionary income to spend. Elliot Burch, a trainer who is in the hall of fame, was once asked what was the most important aspect of training racehorses. Without hesitation, he answered “Training owners to spend money buying good racehorses.”
You can be the best trainer on earth and if you can’t get decent horses to train, you might never make a living as a racehorse trainer. If you review the biographies of most successful trainers, you find out that they started out working for a successful trainer (or trainers), and when they were ready to go out on their own, they acquired their first clients through references from the trainer they worked for.
What I would advise you to do is, as soon as you possibly can, which would be when you are 18, go to work for a trainer. You want to benefit from their experience and learn from them, and you also want to start to make connections that will help you to acquire clients.
With regards to the college degree, if you could do that while working part time or working summers at the racetrack, that’s not a bad way to go. But you need to catch a break when it comes to getting clients, and that is more usually done through connections in the business than any other way.
Good luck.
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