Episode 51: Recapping the 2023 Saratoga Women In Business Spectacular

Your hosts Jen and Jenn review the 2023 Saratoga Women In Business Spectacular and include highlights from speakers as well as a roundtable discussion.

Equestrian B2B Guests and Links Episode 51:

US Equestrian Panel

 

Sonja Keating, Chief Operating Officer & General Counsel, US Equestrian

 Sonja rode when she younger until she started law school at the University of KY. While in law school and active in the Junior League of Lexington, she served on the horse show board for the Junior League of Lexington Horse Show. Sonja practiced law in the commercial litigation department at Dinsmore & Shohl. She joined USEF 17 years ago. Sonja also serves as an inaugural member of the Advisory Council for the Horseracing Integrity & Welfare Unit, a division established in 2022 by Drug Free Sport International to administer the rules and enforcement mechanisms of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority’s Anti-Doping and Medication Control Program.

 

Debbie Saliling, Director of Compliance, US Equestrian

Debbie grew up around horses, riding saddle seat equitation as a child, and during college, she competed in Eventing and worked summers on an Arabian/Half-Arabian breeding farm. Later, with her family, she spent 25 years in Singapore, where she ran professional golf tournaments for IMG across Asia, worked in marketing for Intel Corporation, and circled back to horses through training to be a therapeutic riding instructor and operating a riding program for children with learning challenges. In 2020, she relocated to Kentucky, accepting a role at US Equestrian, and re-started her Eventing hobby. 

 

Judy Sloan, USEF Secretary Treasurer and Board Officer

Judy is a lifelong equestrian and has participated in the Hunter/Jumper/ Fox Hunting and Dressage disciplines. She is a United States Dressage Federation Silver Medalist and competes at the National and FEI levels of the sport. Judy enjoyed a successful 40-year career, the last 25 years spent as a senior Partner at Deloitte. While there, she held numerous Global and National roles and was known for her ability to transform businesses and secure followership through significant change.

Judy gives her time to various not-for-profit equestrian organizations. She is the Secretary Treasurer and an Officer of US Equestrian. She is also the Treasurer of The Caribbean Equine Relief Fund and an avid volunteer at GallopNYC where she serves on the Advisory Council and Vinceramos Therapeutic Riding Center where she provides on-the-ground support to the riders and their horses.

 

Vicki Lowell, Chief Marketing and Content Officer, US Equestrian

Vicki rode when she was younger but competed just a handful of times before going to college and pursuing a career in marketing. She received her MBA at Wharton Business School and worked at Procter and Gamble and Discovery Communications for a combined 25 years.  She returned to riding in her early 30s and became involved in the horse industry first as a volunteer serving on the Board of the Washington International Horse Show, and as a volunteer on the US Equestrian Board of Directors. She has worked in her full-time staff position at US Equestrian since 2016.


Speakers

Andy Belfiore
A native of Massachusetts, Andy Belfiore grew up riding show horses. She started her career in racing on the backstretch at Belmont Park, working as a hotwalker, groom and exercise rider, before joining the Rick Violette stable as assistant trainer. After six years as Violette’s assistant, she moved to the frontside at the track, and spent five years in the communications and marketing departments at NYRA.

Belfiore left NYRA in 1993 to take the post as editor in chief at the Thoroughbred Daily News. During her tenure, the TDN grew from a four-page publication with just a few hundred subscribers to a leader in the Thoroughbred industry. Named Director of Communications for NYTHA in December, 2011, and Executive Director in September, 2015, she was instrumental in the creation of the TAKE2 and TAKE THE LEAD Programs. After two years as a consultant for NYTHA and as Project Manager for the national Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, she took over as Executive Director of the Florida Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association in October of 2021.

Michelle Bloch
Michelle Bloch started her freelance writing business, Writer’s Bloch, in 1992 after graduating from Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. A full-time internship with The Chronicle of the Horse is also where and when she met then staff writer Tricia Booker, who 30 years later would become her business partner. Since then, Michelle has created pages of words and images for mainstream and equestrian publications. After marriage and giving birth to a daughter, she focused on media relations for equestrian events and expanded her business to include graphic design. She’s worked for the Capital Challenge Horse Show for 27 years with various roles requiring writing and design. She created and built the show’s newsletter, the Daily Update—the first print newsletter of its kind at an equestrian event—and took it into the digital age. She is an award-winning journalist, collecting multiple honors from the American Horse Publication Media Awards for her feature writing in USHJA In Stride magazine.

In the midst of the pandemic, Michelle started a publishing company with Tricia Booker. With a focus on education in the equine industry, Ink Horse Publishing was created to help equestrian writers get their work into the hands of their readers. Michelle is at the start of writing a book with a prominent jumper rider but doesn’t have a publication date scheduled yet. Michelle is a lifelong equestrian who taught riders at her New Jersey farm, Ridgeview Riding for 10 years, but today just enjoys the quiet time with her animals. She cares for four horses and two dogs, loves biking, hiking, and tending to the vegetable garden, and bakes far more than she should eat. 

 

Dr. Sam Fielding
Dr. Sam Fielding is an Ivy league-educated Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine. Coming from a family of orthopedic surgeons, she found her way to acupuncture through her lifelong passion for horses.  Growing up in Maryland, Sam rode hunters, jumpers, and event horses as well as worked professionally for steeplechase and timber racehorse trainers. All she wanted to do was to ride professionally, but with zero support from her family in a career as a pro rider, she chose to go to vet school instead. As life will do, she quickly realized that being a vet wasn’t the life for her and began a decades-long journey of “following the crumbs” to a life that she could never have imagined, which meant over two decades away from horses full time. After a debilitating struggle with PPD after the birth of her first daughter and struggling from suicide, she found her way back to a life she thought she’d never experience again with the help of horses.

It has become her life’s work to share her understanding of how we shape the worlds we live in through the power of our minds. She firmly believes that all lovers of horses share a unique gift in our connection to horses. She shares her perspective on the power of our connection to horses and its purpose to help us heal as individual humans, and from there expand our compassion to help heal not only our communities, but also heal the world.  “It all starts with each of us, in our own minds.” – Dr. Sam

Lauren Reischer
Lauren Reischer is a 24-year-old woman born with Cerebral Palsy who started therapeutic riding at age three by the recommendation of her surgeon after a reconstructive hip surgery. After “graduating” from therapeutic riding, she took to riding recreationally and competitively with hunter/jumper barns on Long Island. In 2021 she graduated from Brown University where she co-captained their NCAA Equestrian Team and earned her Bachelors degree in Education and Public Policy. Following her graduation, she worked as Director of Development at Special Olympics New York (SONY) where she raised money to help create the Summer Show Series, a program which gives the equestrian athletes of SONY the opportunity to compete alongside the larger H/J community at ‘A’ shows in their own signature Equitation division. Although she now works in Public Relations at the American Thoracic Society, she still spearheads the SONY equestrian program and turned Professional in September 2022 to continue growing this program and cultivating the next class of riders with disabilities.

Christine Rolando
Christine Rolando is the CEO of Signet Equine Appraisals. She has been a renowned Certified Equine Appraiser in New York and beyond for more than four decades. With her business Signet Equine Appraisals, Christine started appraising horses in 1980 and has dealt with every difficult appraisal scenario possible, from IRS audits to divorce and international litigation and court settlements. Christine has also become one of the first ever in the U.S. to appraise frozen semen and frozen embryos. She has helped to place thousands of horses for donors and is very familiar with the tax process for situations like university riding teams, rescues, and therapeutic centers to name a few. For 10 years, she served as the Executive Director of one of the first therapeutic horse centers in the United States. Christine is the host of Horse Sense Radio podcast and for three years hosted Horse Sense on live radio in the New York metropolitan area. She also was the host of the not-for-profit Notebook for many years. Christine has been a speaker at The Arabian Youth Nationals, Equifest, and the American Horse Council National Convention. Christine has owned and operated her own show barn, has bred top show horses, and has instructed both children and adults throughout her career. Christine currently works with the Blue Arrow Farm Horse Rescue in Pine Island, NY, and Home For Good Dog Rescue in Berkeley Heights, NJ, both not-for-profits.

Nicole Scribner
Nicole Scribner is VP of Business Development for Pursuit Community Finance. She has spent more than 25 years in various roles in retail banking and made the transition to small business lending in 2019. She works out of the Albany office for Pursuit covering the North Country, Central New York, Hudson Valley, and Capital Regions of New York. Nicole has owned horses for most of her life, but took an almost 20-year hiatus from 1995-2015 to raise two sons. Once the youngest went to college, she got back into it and has three Quarter Horses. Two are pasture ornaments due to injury and the third is an all-around horse named Oliver. Nicole shows open shows and smaller QH breed shows. She has two adult sons that are on their own and lives in Granville, NY.

Tattie Singer
Tattie Singer graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 2008 and was captain of the Hunt Seat Equestrian Team her senior year. Upon graduation, she went to New York City and worked for a marketing agency in shopper marketing for Unilever working brands such as SlimFast and Ragu. After a few years in the city, trying to ride on the side and missing the horses, Tattie began working in Sponsorship for the Breeders’ Cup World Championships and learning about the world of racing. Wanting to be back in the day-to-day management of horses, she returned to her family’s hunter/ jumper farm just south of Boston as well as being a caretaker to her younger sister with Autism. It was then that she became passionate about working with those with intellectual disabilities in the equestrian space, as Watershed Farm was a worksite for adults and kids with Autism and other neuro-divergent disabilities. 

Once the cold winters of Massachusetts became too much, Tattie went back to the event side of horse shows, working for the Split Rock Jumping Tour and most recently the United States Equestrian Federation in Sponsorship. With a COVID-induced lay off, the opportunity to join the media side of the equestrian world arose, and she is currently at Horse & Country, the leading international sports network for the passionate and active equestrian community. Tattie is eager to grow the equestrian sport and the love of horses with as many folks as possible.

Sue van der Linden
Sue van der Linden is a Senior Vice President, Wealth Advisor at The Linden Group at Morgan Stanley. Sue has a BA from the University of Virginia, and an MBA from The George Washington University, where she was elected to Beta Gamma Sigma. She joined Dean Witter Reynolds in 1994, which is now Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, a division of Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated. Throughout her career, her focus has been on the individual investor. She has earned a variety of professional designations including the CIMA®, CPWA®, CFP®, ChFC®, CWS®, and AIF®. She is a member of IMCA, PMI, and APIC. She also serves on the Board of Directors of APIC and is the current president of PMI. Sue was born in Dublin, GA. Her Army/Veterans Administration family moved frequently before settling in the Washington, D.C. area. She now lives with her husband, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, their daughter, three rescued cats, two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, and two horses in Washington, D.C.  She enjoys competing in equestrian eventing and dressage, cooking for her family, savoring a fine wine, and taking photographs while hiking in Rock Creek Park.

Emily Urban Cordeiro
Emily Urban Cordeiro is the Founder of The Rising Equestrian Pro, a platform which helps young riders strategically prepare for a professional riding/training career. She has found success both inside and outside the equestrian world. Having spent many years training and riding for top professionals in the eventing and hunter/jumper worlds, as well as developing her own horses, Emily now runs a successful training and teaching business while also pursuing a PhD at Cornell University (data science for agriculture). Her experience working with top executives in the private sector, as well as with venture capitalists, has given her valuable business applications for the equestrian world. Emily is a graduate H-A from the United States Pony Clubs and holds degrees in Agricultural Extension & Education (B.S. Penn State; M.S. University of Georgia). She lives in Ithaca, NY, with her husband and baby daughter.