From Napa Valley Register
By Andy Wilcox
Napa Valley College student Willow Newcomb returned from last weekend’s Reno Rodeo Extreme Mustang Makeover with nearly $7,000 in earnings and a reserve champion title.
Preparation for the event began 100 days earlier, when Newcomb and 27 other competitors picked up their assigned horses at a wild horse holding facility in Sparks, Nevada. The purpose of the event is to promote Mustang adoptions while offering trainers a share of a $20,000 purse.
For Newcomb, the event began with ice, a foot of snow and spinning tires as she made her way to the pickup location. This is where she met her future champion, a 4-year-old black gelding who was gathered a year prior from Diamond HMA, a range outside Pyramid Lake.
Bureau of Land Management staff made due with the conditions by pulling Newcomb’s truck and trailer to the loading chute with a tractor. Once the trailer was in place, the assigned mustang was herded in and Newcomb was headed home.
“Half-heartedly joking, we suggested naming him Donner because it felt like we were going to end up stranded like the Donner Party,” Newcome recalled.
The name ended up sticking, and after a hectic first day, Donner had made it to his temporary home at the Olive Branch Ranch in east Napa. The facility is owned by Newcomb’s grandparents, Karen and Raymond Mecchi, who began Newcomb’s involvement with Mustangs in 2007. Since then, the team has taken on and re-homed more than a dozen horses.
Newcomb has had many offers to drop her amateur status and start training professionally, but her interests extend beyond making a career out of horse training. She aims to continue her education with goals of going onto veterinary school, and competing with Mustangs on the side when time allows.
Newcomb balanced a full load of classes during the spring semester while training Donner and an Idaho Extreme Mustang Makeover horse. As she kept up her grades in school, she also kept up a training page on Facebook, “Willow’s Mustangs,” to keep potential adopters and interested followers up to date on the progress of her horses.
“If I can train and adopt out one horse through the makeover, I consider it a success,” she said. “Through social media, I was able to connect with people around the globe and demonstrate how I train my horses using Donner as an example, which led to many more success stories.”
Compared to past horses, Newcomb felt like this one was progressing at a slower rate. She even considered pulling him out of the competition because he was stuck on being wild. Once she won Donner’s trust on the ground, things began to pick up pace. They were one of the last teams to begin riding, but on Day 45 the transition from groundwork to saddle work began. The foundation laid down in the first few weeks is what Newcomb attributed to her success in the show pen several weeks late.
Only 17 of the original 28 competitors made it to the event. The first day she arrived, she recalled, she was sitting on her horse in the warm-up pen and saw another Mustang run past her, bucking in response to the saddle. But the relationship she had built with Donner was tested to be stronger than any natural bond he had between any other horses.
The weekend proceeded with a series of classes held at the Reno Livestock and Events Center during the rodeo.
Saturday’s preliminary round consisted of a Handling and Conditioning class, a Pattern class and a Trail class. The horses’ conditioning and handling ability were evaluated as they encountered obstacles similar to those expected during a ride on a nature trail.
On Sunday were the compulsory class, finals and adoption. The 10 teams with the highest combined scores in the preliminaries moved onto the freestyle finals, where the trainers had 3 1/2 minutes to wow the crowd and judges with a routine set to music, props and costumes.
Newcomb had a solid performance throughout the weekend, claiming the overall championship in the preliminary classes, reserve champion in the finals, and Young Gun Champion.
After the competition, Donner topped the sale for almost $6,000. He was in the middle of a bidding war between the event-producing board member and a couple who had watched his progress online from Day 1. He ended up landing with Leah and Russ Earl of Reno, where he will spend his days in the company of eight other BLM horses and burros. Through the Mustang Heritage Foundation, all of the competing horses were adopted out for an average price of $1,500. Matt Zimmerman, a Mustang Makeover veteran and professional trainer from Caldwell, Idaho, won the event by only 5.5 points and his horse sold for $3,100.
She competed in an Extreme Mustang Makeover two Januarys ago in Texas, where her 5-year-old mare, Patches, led the sale at $7,500.
Newcomb has one more show on the books for the year, an Extreme Mustang Makeover July 24-25 in Nampa, Idaho. She will once again take on some of the horse industries top Mustang trainers, including Zimmerman.
“Coming back reserve champion of the Reno event is something I will get excited about,” she said, “especially when I have horses at home that will help me work towards getting the blue next time.”