Why we started recording Derek

Derek Sturniolo has spent most of his life around horses. He grew up in harness racing and moved over to Thoroughbreds. He rode races for 25 years, trained his own stable, worked six years as an assistant to Barclay Tagg, and has galloped horses for a living since 2005. Today he's a racing official in Texas. He came out of all of it with more than 30 years of knowledge and stories that were never written down.

His daughter realized that if nobody recorded it, it would be gone. So she started sitting down with him: sometimes just talking, sometimes out in the barn with a horse in front of them.

Two things worth saving

The first is the history. His racing career, the horses he worked with, the people who taught him, the unusual horses he still remembers, the two trips to the Kentucky Derby, old photos and newspaper clippings, and stories even his family had never heard.

The second is the horsemanship. All the little things he does because he's done them for decades: how he assesses a horse, how he works out what's normal for it, what he feels when he gets on one, how he looks at legs and feet, and how he thinks about feeding, conditioning, recovery and behavior.

One idea kept coming up

The more we recorded, the more the same philosophy came out of him. Learn the individual horse. Know their normal. Pay attention when something changes.

There's plenty of horse information out there. A lot of it is scattered, a lot of it contradicts itself, and a lot of it is trying to sell you something. We didn't want to add one more voice saying there's one right feed or one right program. We wanted to show how an experienced horseman thinks about the horse in front of him.

What we're building

Every time we record a conversation or a hands-on session, we pull the method out of it and turn it into a module, with worksheets, trackers and practical tools you can use with your own horse. That collection is The Old-School Horseman. The stories go into Barn Notes. The gear Derek actually uses goes in the Tack Room, each piece tied to the lesson where it matters.

We're just getting started. If there's something you want to learn from Derek, tell us.