Growing up in the suburbs of New York City, Meghan Laffin relished the weekends and summers when she would visit her aunt, Gaye Bergstrom, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, horse country. They would visit the iconic Devon Horse Show in nearby Devon, Pennsylvania, where watching top riders compete inspired Laffin.
Laffin mucked stalls and did chores at local barns to pay for lessons, but she never had her own horse. Her parents were practical, middle-class people who encouraged her to earn a college degree in a more lucrative field so she’d be able to pay for horses down the road.
During middle school, Laffin was scouted by volleyball coaches who thought her 6’ frame gave her a natural talent for the sport. She earned a scholarship to Coastal Carolina University (South Carolina) where she played Division I volleyball, learning teamwork skills that would serve her well when, in 2016, burnout at a job in television in New York City caused her to reevaluate her career path.
Now, nearly 10 years after leaving the corporate world, Laffin is achieving her personal dressage goals on a giant, opinionated mare and working as a groom and barn manager for Olympic dressage rider Kasey Perry-Glass’ small group of horses.
“Before this job, I would have thought that in order to be successful in this world, you need to have eight horses a day that you’re riding, and I would have just thought that you had to work yourself into the ground in that way and have all those horses going and that every successful program was like this big, massive program,” she said. “I think that truly, my favorite part of this job is how much it’s taught me about how much work goes into curating just one elite horse. Kasey is kind of a master at that. If you really give yourself the space to spend time with them and understand them, [it’s amazing] how many things you can actually catch on to and understand and change in order to help your performance.”
Perry-Glass enjoys working one-on-one with Laffin and appreciates her insight into the care of her horses.
“I tell her all the time about how amazing of a person she is,” Perry-Glass said. “I cannot tell you how honest and ethical and down to earth and just genuine that Meghan is, and I think that in our sport, we need more of it. She really does deserve kind of the world [in] the sport, so I keep trying just to push her in the right direction any way I can.”
Finding Her Way
Laffin, 32, studied business management at Coastal Carolina. She didn’t ride during her college years, mostly due to time constraints with volleyball. During her junior year, she visited “The Today Show” in New York City, and she thought it might be fun to work behind the scenes in the fast-paced world of television production. She took classes related to the field, and while networking for internships, met Batt Humphreys, a former executive producer at CBS. He put in a good word for her at CBS, which led to an internship.
Laffin started visiting Humphreys and his wife at their South Carolina farm on weekends and rekindled her love of horses. “It kind of got me back in love with that lifestyle,” she recalled, “and it was a kind of wild, small-world coincidence that it was horses that connected me to that next step.”
Laffin started to feel at home around horses again, but once she got an associate producer job at “CBS This Morning,” she was consumed with work and the fast-paced lifestyle she thought she wanted. She took Amtrak south to Pennsylvania on weekends to visit her aunt and decompress around her horses.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Despite having a really cool career, I just couldn’t shake it from my heart; I just really was being pulled back in that direction, and living in New York City, I couldn’t be in a more opposite life,” she said. “That began this quest to figure out how to get my lifestyle more back towards horses.”
Though she was climbing the ladder at CBS, she wasn’t making enough to afford horses, especially in a high cost-of-living area. So she started bouncing around ideas to transition into a more-horse friendly lifestyle.
A trip to Dressage At Devon with her aunt was another motivating factor as Laffin decided her future. She was captivated by the elegance and grace of Grand Prix horses to the point of obsession—watching Carl Hester Masterclasses and other clinic videos to absorb as much as she could.
Someone she knew through collegiate volleyball connected her to Iron Rock Dressage in California—the opportunity Laffin needed to leap back into the horse world. But she worried that without being independently wealthy, it would be hard to make a good living.
“I was always afraid, too, because of how much I loved it,” she said. “I was afraid to base my income on it. And I think I felt a little bit protective of it, and I felt a little bit scared to ruin it with that.”
Laffin created a safety net by earning her master’s degree in business at the University of California, Davis, on nights and weekends while working for Iron Rock full time.
At the farm, she learned how to do everything from drive a trailer to give vaccinations, and she was able to ride a lot of horses as she worked on her dressage education. Though she had her dream job, Laffin still believed she’d return to the business world once she’d completed her MBA, but in the summer of 2019, she came across an ad that Perry-Glass had posted. The rider was preparing for possible Tokyo Olympic Games selection with Goerklintgaards Dublet in 2020 and needed a new groom.
“It’s one thing to dream about pursuing something like that, but to really get to see it up close—I just thought that would be so incredible,” said Laffin. “And I could already just tell that Kasey just seemed like such a good person. It really gave me that butterfly feeling when I saw her post.”
Perry-Glass had a good feeling from their first phone call and was thrilled to hire Laffin.
“I think she handles herself very well under pressure, which I find very difficult to find,” she said. “She’s insanely organized, and her educational background really helped me build my business up, because at that point, I was just at the tail end of [‘Dublet’s’ career] and trying to figure out what was next for me and my business. Even though I have a business degree, she had more education than I did. She was able to help me structure a lot of how I run my business.”
In her job after Iron Rock, Laffin wanted riding time, and Perry-Glass gave her the ride on Stina 2W, a homebred Hanoverian (Sezuan—Wellissimia, Weltruhm) when the mare was 5. A “troubled child” according to Laffin, “Stina” grew to 18 hands, and Perry-Glass wasn’t sure what to do after she’d a bad accident with the mare and lost confidence in riding her. Laffin was a good fit, both in height and patience.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Meghan clicked with her from the beginning, personality-wise, and it just became a building block; Meghan understood her personality really well,” said Perry-Glass. “They’ve been going at it, and [Stina’s] 11 now. She’s been on her and building her up to the small tour, which was not easy.”
“Stina was just such a feisty girl, and so [Kasey’s husband Dana Glass] would just take her out to work cows and just let her burn her energy off,” Laffin added. “We have videos of Stina, just like running through rivers, and she’s just like a wild thing. I’ve gotten to do a little bit of that stuff with her as well, but now we’ve worked up the levels together, and we have gotten along super, super well. I like getting to develop her, and just winning over her trust is the real prize because she’s opinionated and you can’t take it lightly when she gives that to you.”
Perry-Glass appreciates Laffin’s tactful approach to every horse she rides.
“What I love most about Meghan is that she doesn’t bring emotion into her riding,” she said. “She’s always been insanely fair to every horse that she’s been on, and she really hones in on the basics and trying to get a foundation going before she even tries to push for anything. She’s very talented in that way, which is hard to find.”
While the COVID-19 pandemic created economic uncertainty, Laffin’s early years with Perry-Glass solidified her decision to try to make a career in horses.
“I had continuously been telling myself that there was no good career to have in horses, and yet, there I was,” she said. “I just was like, I’m loving this, and I just can’t give it up. And not to mention the business world and the prospects of a business job looked very odd with COVID going on. It really gave me the grace or the room and the space to just stay with it and keep doing the thing that I loved. Then then fast forward six years: I think I’m committed!”
Laffin and Perry-Glass are very hands-on with their group of horses, which ranges from three to six at a time. Their schedule changed a bit when Perry-Glass had her daughter, Tru Lynn Glass, in 2021, but their dynamic hasn’t changed.
“It’s felt like I hit the lotto, because I get to be on this person’s team and learn so much from them. And then also, she’s on my team, and she coaches me, and she believes in me, and she pushes me,” said Laffin.
There are times Laffin fully wears her groom hat, like when Perry-Glass competed her top horse Heartbeat W.P. in Europe this summer, but they also have a mutually beneficial relationship. They bounce ideas off each other in the barn, and Perry-Glass will often groom for Laffin when she competes.
“When I’m showing, and we’re in Wellington [Florida], Kasey’s there with the backpack, taking my boots with a baby on her hip and being the groom for me,” Laffin said. “I mean, who am I? Who am I to have the Olympian helping me? I feel insanely lucky that I get to have that kind of situation, but I think because of that, we’ve all become so close to where we really are kind of like a family.”
Do you know an exceptional groom who deserves to be showcased in our Groom Spotlight section? If so, email kloushin@coth.com to tell us all about that person.
