Page 90 - 2018 Barrel Stallion Register

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t
h by Diane Rice
Amberley Snyder’s future looked bright. In 2009 at age 18, the talented barrel racer, pole bender, goat tier and breakaway roper from Elk Ridge, Utah, qualified for the National High School Finals in pole bending and won the National Little Britches Association’s All- Around Cowgirl World Championship. She was elected as Utah state’s FFA president for 2010. She planned to serve her term and compete in college rodeo. “All I wanted to do was be a bar- rel racer and go to the NFR,” she says.
But on January 10, 2010, her life’s roadmap took a permanent detour when she neglected to buckle up. While driving near Sinclair, Wyoming, to the Denver Stock Show and Rodeo, she looked down
at her map for a moment. Her vehicle drifted lanes, heading for a metal beam. She tried to get back into her lane but overcorrected, slid off the road and rolled. She was ejected and slammed into a fence post, which broke her back and paralyzed her legs.
Following five hours of emergency surgery, doc- tors told Amberley she’d never regain feeling below her waist; she’d never walk again. But Amberley inherited a competitive, can-do spirit from her dad, pro baseball player Cory Snyder, and her mom, horse fanatic Tina, and she wasn’t about to let a broken back stand in her way. Whether she walked again didn’t really matter to her; what did matter was that she rode her horses again. And after just four months, she accomplished that goal for the first time. Then, “[Eighteen months after the accident] it was
a Saturday when I finally could lope a barrel pattern, and I entered on Monday,” she says. “My very first run out, I was a second off of what I was before.”
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photos courtesy Amberley Snyder
There’s No Future in Giving Up
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88 SPEEDHORSE
Amberley began riding at age 3, pictured here with her lesson horse Cha Cha.
8-year-old Amberley with first barrel horse Lacey.
Amberley and her first horse, Gabby.
Amberley, at age 18, with some of her many buckles and saddles.