Mike And May Edwards

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34 – January/February, 2024

By Megan Sacia Ulrich

With 87 combined years of experience in the horse industry, Mike and May Edwards are no strangers to success. Mike won his first World title in 1979 in Working Cow Horse while he was riding with Bob Avila. Just four years later, then working on his own, one of Mike’s clients became his first World Champion Youth rider; she won the Hunt Seat Equitation and earned Reserve in Horsemanship.

Since then, the Edwards’ successes have just kept building. In 2023, two of their youth clients won titles in perhaps the most prestigious and competitive classes at the AQHYA World Show: Alexandra Rippeon took the L3 Youth 13 & Under Horsemanship while Sydney Swallom won the L3 Youth 14-18 Horsemanship for her second consecutive year. The recipe to their success? Equal parts passion, dedication, and a desire for continuous improvement.

Growing up in California, May was an absolutely horse crazy little girl. She was mesmerized by the horses at the nearby racetrack and couldn’t get enough of the family’s vacation tradition of renting beach horses and riding on the coast. But they lived on a shoestring budget, so when 11-year-old May was gifted her first horse for Christmas in 1983–an unbroke half-Arab–she took on a paper route and a job cleaning stalls to pay for its expenses. At local open shows, though, it was the Quarter Horses that caught her eye, and she promised herself that someday that would be the breed she’d ride competitively.

Click here to read the complete article
34 – January/February, 2024