If it was not for the recent comment submitted supposedly by Willie herself in the Ohio Trainers from Hell post I would have not looked farther into her operation. Thanks Willie for bringing attention to yourself. Let's look into Willie Matthews business at the Bar W in Ohio, shall we?
First I checked out her website and found a pic of her draped all over a small 2 year old horse which looked more like a yearling in the photo (below).
On her current website she mentions her experience in a photo (below) as 25 years.
If you take a look at the website in 2006 you can see that she claims to have 14 years experience. So in 2 years this woman miraculously gained 9 years experience. I also have to confess that she doesn't look like she is almost 50, that is the age she would be if she started professionally training at around 20-25 years old. I am sorry but I don't include having a horse as a child as "professional experience". That is like saying I am an electronics engineer since I was 6 because I operated the remote control on the TV. By the way if you look more into the archives of her old website you will see that she graduated in 1990 with an AA degree in horse science (an AA is not much more than saying you have graduated from a junior college and most people have those nowadays) Also she does not mention the colleges by name just location. Most people will list the colleges and schools they attended by name because they are proud of them and want people to check them out via references from the school.
Now on to her claims of being a "Certified Judge". On the old website she is a certified 4-H judge which as I can tell you doesn't mean much. I was the adviser to a small 4-H horse group that had a judge that knew very little about horses. She kept a few ponies for the grand kids and that was her total experience. But because they could not find anyone else to volunteer at the shows she was drafted by the 4-H group.
She also has a section on her "deep thoughts" which is interesting.
A note to Willie: Next time you post a comment it would be better if you made your Google profile open and not private and for a screen name I would not pick "nooneimportant".
Update: Willie made a comment about this post under the Ohio trainers from hell post you can read it here. My thoughts are, the photo above about the 25 years "experience" is very misleading advertising. I know if a local retail store mislead their customers in such a way then they have broken some "truth in advertising" laws.
How to locate the horse trainer from hell
Please read this first
If you are looking for a horse trainer and don't know who to avoid then just look them up here. Look under your location (if no location then just suggest one under any of the posts as a comment and I will add it ASAP) for horse trainers from hell and look at the comments. See if the horse trainer you are thinking about taking lessons from or sending your horse to has a tale from hell. If you have experienced a horse trainer from hell either a professional or amateur then let off some steam here and let the rest of the horse world know about them. Don't forget to name names. Please read this first before posting If the trainer in question disputes the claims they find on here then they are very welcome to post a comment too. Tell only the truth. Comments are only moderated to screen out ads for websites or "buy this or that" spam and for not staying on topic. General comments should be made under the "General Blog Posts" category.