 Hi everyone, I'm with Eric Schmoyer who won the 2016 NCHA World Title in the $15,000 Amateur Division. He rode Miss Nita. Congratulations to you, Eric. Thank you. Thank you very much. Eric, how does it feel to win your first world title and also to win the average? It was pretty amazing. It was pretty amazing. I spent a lot of the year hauling pretty hard. I planned it with Ben last year and I came into the world finals. Honestly, I tried to lock it up and I was pretty close. But then I was just like, all right, well, let's just go out there. Let's just do well. Let's get a check. And Ben's like, no, no. We're going to go down there and we're going to win it. I'm like, okay, Ben. But yeah, we practiced hard and we got the right cows and it all worked out. So yeah, we had two really great runs. So you came in with a $2,500 lead or so. Quite enough room to be really complacent about how you showed. Correct. Correct. So yeah, a few dollars off. I mean, in theory, second place could have caught me if I didn't catch a check here or a good enough check here. So I mean, there was some pressure on me because I couldn't imagine hauling the whole year and ended up second place. Exactly. Tell us about your horse. Oh man. Ben found her for me last year. I finished up in 2014 in the top 15 and figured, okay, I think I want to do this again. So I had met Ben that year. He helped me a little bit out here. And I said, I definitely want to haul, find me a horse. So he called me in August and said, okay, I think I found the horse for you. You're going to have to lope her a lot. And I said, well, he says, but on the eighth day of a show, she's going to come out strong. I'm like, all right. So I bought her in, I guess, October. She brought her to Southerns and I went to Southerns as the first time we showed. I walked to the herd on her after loping her for about 15 minutes and working the flag on her and marked 74 on her. Wow. So you always had some good chemistry together then? Yeah. We figured it out. She's, I mean, I love her to death. She's a little quirky, but she's, she needs a little bit of lope and a little bit of extra. TLC? Yes. TLC. That's a good way of putting it. But she's, she's high energy. I mean, I showed her, you know, in Batesville in the Southerns. I don't know, we were on 12 or 13 days in a row of showing and she still is coming out strong and fresh. Okay. Tell us about the year hauling, the highs and the lows. What really stands out in your memory? It was, I mean, in some ways, it was a really tough year. I, I mean, emotionally, I started off in Batesville. I had a pretty good week there. I did okay in San Antonio. I drove all the way to Houston, got run over on my first cow. I think it was a San Antonio. I mean, I was kind of compulsively checking the standings and Ben kind of sat me down and said, look, you just can't do it. It's way too early. So he's like, make me a promise. Just don't look at the standings. I'm like, okay. All right. You know, you're the boss. So I quit looking and I, and I look for shows, though, when stuff was slow here because of, you know, the NCHA events and then even the Easterns, which is a great show, but then count for it. I kind of hauled and went out to Nevada, went out to California for all of May. I came back and I said, okay, Ben, it's the end of May. I can look at the standings now, right? And I think at that point in time I had a $5,000 lead. But essentially you did it with just two horses throughout the year. I did it with two horses. And I'd say I probably should need it 80% of the time. She stayed sound with a lot of showing. Oh, yeah, she did. She did. Honestly, she was still ready to cut. My honest problem was keeping weight on her. I mean, people were looking at me like you're crazy, like I was feeding her three times a day. I mean, you know, hauling her, you know, California and back and showing so much. And because she's high energy, she needs a lot of lope. You know, it was kind of a joke. You know, I was on my horse an hour and a half or two hours before the fan, everybody's looking at me like I'm crazy, but... You probably lost weight, too. A little bit, yes. Yes. Yes, I'll tell you, there were some days I was lor, so, yeah. Okay. Now you're from Pennsylvania. Tell us about the cutting scene there and how you got started. Well, that's sort of a long story and I'll try and condense it. I rode as a kid, 4-H, pleasure horses. I quit riding when I was like 15. And I guess about 2011, I don't know, I got the bug and decided I missed the horses. I had some riding lessons and maybe I'll go on one of those, you know, ranch vacations. So I searched around and I found a trainer about a half an hour south of my house, Johnny Costa, who I kind of remembered because he used to work for Willowbrook Farms and I remember that was big back when I was growing up as a kid. So I called him up and said, hey, I used to ride horses and can I take some riding lessons. And they were like, well, we kind of do cutting horses here. I said, well, that sounds fun. I never did it. Okay. So it took a couple of lessons. They put me on the flag and it was downhill from there. I bought an old gelding. I started showing up in Pennsylvania a little bit. We have three shows a year. We have snow. We have very hot weather in the summer. And it's tough to try and learn and practice when, you know, you show in June and you get run over in a rerun class and then you can show again in September. So I looked around and decided that I was going to try and do some clinics or something. Johnny said, hey, for your money, go down to Florida, pack up your horse, go to Ted Soakles and camp out there for a few weeks. So I ended up doing that in the fall of 2013. And then I started showing some more. And then that's how I started showing a lot because I ended up in the standings and going to Batesville and sort of just kept growing on that. And then through Ted, I met Ben here in Texas. And then he helped me when I was showing and coming through here in 2014. And that's when I decided that, you know, if I was going to haul for real, I probably needed to not be going back and forth to Pennsylvania or even Florida. So I said, hey, you know, I'm going to haul. Can I come out here? And I'm probably going to have to lay over at your ranch a couple of times during the year because I'm not going to be going home. So that's sort of the long or the short version of the long story. Obviously, by doing that, you become you develop a really good relationship with your trainer because you kind of live with them at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm there. I mean, most weekends I was showing, but in between, if it was reasonable, I probably end up laying over him if it was close enough. Like I said, and I was gone most of May in California and back through into Arizona. I laid over with Cody Lamont at Al Dunning's place a few times when I was out that way. So you get to know a lot of people in the cutting community very well. I take it when you do that. That was the best part. And to me, as I said, that was the worst part for me this year because my other mare got hurt that I ended up not going out to Colorado and doing that circuit because I really like going to all the different parts of the country and meeting new people. I was really surprised when I started doing this, the real warmth and friendliness of a lot of people. I would show up like in California. They'd see Pennsylvania plates on my truck. They kind of put two into it to figure out who I was. And they'd be like, do you know anybody here? I'm like, no. I'm like, oh, well, you know, get your horse settled. Let's go to dinner. He introduced me to all the trainers out there. I mean, it was everybody was really welcoming. It was a really great experience. So what are the plans for next year then? Catch up. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to leave my horses with Ben and I'll probably come down and fly down and show a couple of big shows, maybe Easterns, maybe Westerns, maybe one of the stock shows. I need a little break. I probably have like a ton of chores at my place in Pennsylvania that trees that need to be pruned, fence lines that need to be fixed, all sorts of stuff like that. So yeah, we'll take it from there. But I'm going to show for fun for a while. We'll enjoy. Thanks for joining us. All right. Thank you. Thank you.