Page 60 - May 2021

“...we’re letting him have his style. We’re letting him figure himself out and he’s getting it done.”
– Stevi Hillman
He was a lot of fun to train and we did good in some futurities, too. So that kind of sparked my passion for training a horse off the track.
“You have to be patient with a racehorse,
so we are taking things slow with him,” she continued. “We’ve been taking our time, reassuring him, teaching him collection, teaching him to rate and teaching him to turn. We’ve been working on rating and turning for a good while. He’s come a real long way in a short amount of time. He’s really starting to understand the rate and the turn now, so now I’m putting a little more pressure on him and making him go a
little faster. He’s taking it really well, but we’re making sure we have the foundation with rating and turning a barrel first. We don’t have to worry about his speed – we know he’s superfast.”
Hillman laughed. She’s enjoying B Bad.
“It took me about two minutes to decide to take him,” she said. “Melissa brought him over
Stevi Hillman with Born To B Bad
and let me ride him at my place. He was really well broke for a racehorse. I didn’t expect him to feel quite so good. Well, I’d been wanting to try a racehorse off the track again, so I feel like he’s a blessing that came along. He’s definitely a fast horse, so we’ve been taking it slow and I’ll tell you, he’s a lot of fun.
“Right now, he’s at that phase where he knows how to run – because he’ll take off and run, no problem – but he’s learning
how to handle himself rating and turning,” she said. “So far, we’ve just run him for
time. The last couple of weeks, we’ve been asking him to go a little faster at the jackpot exhibitions and he’s been handling it well. So, time will tell, but his training is going well, so far. We haven’t entered yet, but we’ve been hauling to different arenas, different setups and different grounds, and letting him figure out how to handle himself in the
exhibitions. He’s learning, for sure, definitely figuring it out.”
Hillman rides B Bad in either of two short-shanked curb bits, one with a jointed mouthpiece and the other with a light port.
“He’s kinda got a stiffer style – he doesn’t have a lot of bend to him,” she says. “But the stiff style on the barrels is actually really fast, so that’s fine with me and we’re letting him have his style. We’re letting him figure himself out and he’s getting it done.”
Which brings us back to Western Sports Round-Up.
“Melissa, your horse is drop-dead gorgeous,” Kenyon said. “Man, that’s a good- looking son of a gun. He’s pretty. If he runs as good as he looks, Stevi, you’ve got your hands on something gorgeous there.”
We’ll see, very soon. Stay tuned. It just might be another hit.
58 SPEEDHORSE May 2021
“If he runs as good as he looks, Stevi, you’ve got your hands on something gorgeous
there.” – Steve Kenyon, Western Sports Round-Up, The Cowboy Channel
2012 WPRA Reserve Rookie of the Year and five-time Wrangler NFR qualifier Stevi Hillman riding MCM Imasharpguy.