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About Us Philosophy
In more than 25 years of working with horses, my core desire has been to enable these magnificent athletes to perform the work they were bred, trained, and love to do. I've managed and trained performance horses in the disciplines of jumping, dressage, and racing. As a result, I have found soundness and fitness issues to be the most interesting, interrelated, and crucial to the horse's performance. I strongly believe that achieving and maintaining optimum performace requires a systematic and collaborative approach. For the past several years, I have focused on equine sports massage as proffered by Jack Meagher, and find that it is uniquely supportive to a balanced training program geared to maximize performance and longevity through fitness, correctness, and sensitivity to the horse's mind and conformation. Noni Van Son
Since the days of her childhood when she used to sneak into a neighbor's barnyard and make friends with his lonely pony, Noni has lived and breathed horses. She ran away from college to gallop race horses with the likes of the late Dooley Adams, firmly ensconced in the Saratoga Hall of Fame. From there, she worked with Dave Kelly--an Olympian from the 1950's. Later, it was back to college and working at one of the top Morgan breeding farms, Tara Farm. Taking time off to have 3 children, Aaron, Nathan, and Hillarie, Noni returned to horses by standing the Thoroughbred stallion, Audited, in Virginia. Simultaneously, she worked as assistant trainer to Paul Chambers at Holly Knoll Farm, where she was involved in starting and training 20-40 pacers and trotters a year to race in Maryland and Virginia.
From Virginia, Noni and her children moved to New York, where she was the barn manager at Chelsea Equestrian Center. There she was responsible for 40-50 school horses. Keeping these horses working sound on a shoestring budget was her biggest challenge. She maintains that her experience with Paul Chambers who is a "fitness and sports injury genius" was her greatest asset in meeting this challenge. In 2000, Noni moved upstate, one child off to college and the other two in high school. She managed Sky Blue Farm with Megan Phillips Drury, the trainer. It was here that she took time to be certified as an equine sports massage therapist by Equissage, in Virginia. Using what she learned there, and throughout her career, she collaborated with Megan to combine fitness, balanced training, nutrition, and massage to build a stable of jumpers who were eventually joint injection free.
Noni now devotes her time to sports therapy massage and groundwork with young horses and problem horses to prevent problems and improve performance in a healthy and positive program that is trainer, owner, and Horse friendly. |
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