July/August 2025 Issue

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Date ____________________ Name ______________________________________________________________ Address _____________________________________________________________ City ________________________________ State ___________ Zip ___________ Email ______________________________________________________________ Get East Coast Equestrian at home! Horse Droppings By Sylvia Sidesaddle By Sylvia Sidesaddle Well, hello again darlings! Syl is VERY excited to share Really Big News with her darlings – East Coast Equestrian, as of May 28, has a new owner! Many of Syl’s sweet things who are in the equine media biz will recognize new owner Brooke Warner fromEquiSearch, Practical Horseman and even the Horse of Delaware Valley! So, for her final column, Syl thought she would interview Steph (the editor, er, former editor) who no one has ever wanted to hear from til now. Syl: You started East Coast Equestrian 32 years ago. Whatever were you thinking?? Steph: It started very innocently, while washing my car. Syl: Where all good ideas start, of course. Steph: I was on the board of the PA Saddlebred Horse Association, whose mission is to promote the breed, and I thought, what better way to start new people riding than to get them into a barn to meet the people and horses? So the Horse Farms Open House was born, a volunteer project, promoted entirely through earned local media, and HUNDREDS of people turned out. This was before the Internet. Syl: (Hears her young darlings gasp) Steph: The second year we needed a way to get people fromone barn to another. My marketing day job had become very toxic. Debbie Reid had beenmy assistant (she had the good sense to quit long before I did) and I hired her to lay out (a typewriter and rubber cement were involved) the 8 pages, hand drew maps and printed 100 copies of a handout. Syl: And you could have stopped there… Steph: I still remember picking up the 100 copies at the printer-- it was the first thing I had done in forever that made me happy. So I decided to keep going. Dave Andrick , who was publisher of Practical Horseman at the time (which, fun fact, started in Unionviile, PAas The Pennsylvania Horseman) invited me to AETA. A Primedia recruiter told me, “You can make a nice living with a publication like this.” News to me! I went home and started figuring it out. When I traveled to bus conventions and press tours for my day job I would spend the evenings researching the mid-Atlantic horse market and found it was huge. I did a lot of things to keep the lights on, mostly travel marketing and PR, and eventually the horse publication competition faded away and life became so much easier. Syl: Did you have any disasters along the way? Thirty two years leaves a lot of room for error. Steph: There were headlines that weren’t exactly correct. There was the first Horse World Expo issue where Deb had to sleep in my guest room to get it all finished in time.We worked frommy basement for years and I had to shovel the long lane so employees could get to work, and I could never take a day off because the staff was in my basement. And my (now-ex) husband was apoplectic when I wouldn’t tell him your true identity, Syl. Syl: Syl has no idea what you’re talking about. Step: But mostly, publishing itself went smoothly, we did our jobs, figured out the hiccups and got it done, lately with four months off a year. Only once did we postpone an upload date. Fiascos were more likely to happen with the many amazing events that hired me for marketing/PR. Like the time a local TV station blew up their new and very expensive live truck trying to film an FEI class at Harrisburg. When the 7,000 copies of the March issue weren’t delivered to Horse World Expo. When Walt Jeffers and I, after the Pennsylvania Equine Council finally got the Equine Liability law passed, were honored with a ride atop a very top-heavy roof seat break pulled by a four in hand along Forbidden Drive, with an increasingly tipsy reinsman in the box. (It was a parade, and I don’t know how that pony cart in front of us survived.) When I was handling marketing for the Willowdale Steeplechase, trying my very best while also publishing ECE, and Deb asked, “Should the horses be running past the front door?” So distracted I forgot to latch the gate. (And then I didn’t get asked back because I confused hurdles and timber in a radio interview.) I spent so much time in Chester County I called the now-defunct diner at Routes 30 and 41 my Chester County office. Syl: Who else did you work with? Steph: The sadly missed Quentin Riding Club. The great people at Ludwig’s Corner. We actually decorated the ECE office to impress Jamie O’Rourke and Martha Barbone when they interviewed me for The Laurels CDE marketing job. I can’t count the number of times I was at the Farm Show Complex at 4 am to get the PNHS or Horse World Expo on the earlymorning news. Sometimes we were preempted and they forgot to tell me. Once a local anchor bet me a Coke he was older thanme and I won. And working with Tommie Turvey was always a blast. Syl: Surely you had help along the way? Steph: We probably wouldn’t be here if Bob Dobart and Denise Parsons hadn’t hired us to do the Horse World Expo program. Same for Anne Moss , Lori Kaminski , Sarah Campbell and the rest of the exceptional Dressage at Devon staff, JeffNewman and Matt Lund at the Maryland 5 Star, and the best people to work with -- Wayne Grafton and Kiley Quinn and so many others at the Devon Horse Show. Lezlie Hiner gave me first crack at several Work To Ride stories. BenNolt kept me current on the FarmShow building expansion. Susan Pizzini introduced me to Jean King , a scientist disabled by her profession, who trained a wild Nokota horse from her wheelchair, which won an award and was republished in a Chicken Soup book. Other prominent horse people called to offer a word of support when times seemed bleak. Too many people to name. But most of all, the staff. Debbie Reid is so instrumental to ECE that when she decided it was time to enjoy life instead of slaving away at ECE (for some reason) I decided not to try to replace her and instead to sell. Phyllis Hurdleston , thankfully, is going to stay on. She is The. Most.Amazing. salesperson I have ever met and has great relationships with her clients. The writers, who were always up for trying to get a story from whatever thin information I could find or for coming up with their own great ideas.And the advertisers—we only fired a handful for bad behavior in three decades. And of course, the readers, who gave me story ideas, let me knowwhen I screwed up, and came to me for help with a zoning law or horse industry statistics or when they saw a horse they thought was in need. And of course, Brooke Warner, an equine publishing master who came along at just the right moment to keep this publication going, which is what I want most. She is doing a great job of figuring things out while unwinding 32 years of platforms, websites, subscriptions, routines, etc. Syl: And what’s next? Steph: First I’ll make room in my email and social media for updates about things other than horses. I’ll also be turning an historic building in my downtown Lancaster City neighborhood into an Airbnb. Which should be quite a feat for someone who fixes everything with baling twine and duct tape. You? Syl: Syl has been lurking in search of scoop for so long she’s not sure what could possibly come next. Maybe a crime novel? Set in a barn? Steph: Thanks, Syl for all your years of scoop and for remaining incognito for three decades! And as always… Together: Be careful where you step! Syl’s sweet things can reach Syl and Steph a little while longer East Coast Equestrian 8916Williams Mill Pond Road, Delmar, Maryland, 21875 (717) 509-9800 E-mail: brooke@eastcoastequestrian.net www.EastCoastEquestrian.net Follow Us Published by Knight Warner Media, LLC Brooke Knight Warner Publisher Stephanie Shertzer Lawson Founder Contributors Marcella Peyre-Ferry, Suzanne Bush, Alicia Martin, Amy Worden, Lois Szymanski, Sylvia Sidesaddle Layout/Design Rose Webster Advertising Director Phyllis Hurdleston Published 6 times a year. Submissions of articles, events and photos are welcome and should be received by the 10th of the month preceding publication. Please call (717) 509-9800 for advertising rates or visit www.eastcoastequestrian.net . We cannot accept copyrighted photos without permission from owner. You must have permission before reprinting anything from East Coast Equestrian. For permission please call (717) 509-9800 or email brooke@eastcoastequestrian.net