Tyson Benson

The two-year-old game is the highest-stakes year in the performance horse business. Played right, it can turn a yearling purchase into a half-million-dollar sale horse. Played wrong, it can burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars — and a horse's future — in a single season. Tyson Benson is the critical puzzle piece for anyone trying to figure out how to play, and win, that game.

For more than five years Tyson has started and developed horses for Ty and Melanie Smith at Solo Select, putting the foundation on a steady stream of winners — including The Darkk Side, who spent nearly his entire two-year-old year under Tyson, and Whistle At Er, the sale horse he owned with Ty Smith that brought $500,000 at auction. An open cow horse futurity finalist who came up through the cow horse and expanded into the cutting, he has started hundreds of two-year-olds and now dedicates his program exclusively to them — and the stalls stay spoken for.

His judgment shows up where the money changes hands. Tyson consigns at the NCHA Futurity Two-Year-Old Sale, evaluates hundreds of yearlings a year alongside Ty Smith across the cutting, cow horse, and rope horse markets, and six months into a colt's training he can tell you which discipline it belongs in — and reroute it early enough to matter.

Tyson is just as valuable on the other side of the fence. For the trainer struggling to build a business — how to win good clients, how to keep them, and how to actually make money training horses — he has lived every step of it, from apprentice to a program with a waiting list, learning the client and business lessons nobody teaches young horsemen. That is the knowledge an hour with Tyson buys: which programs actually make futurity horses, how to pick the yearling worth starting, what a sale-ready two-year-old looks like, and how to run a training operation that lasts. In a game where you can win really big or lose really big, a horseman with the experience and the connections to keep you on the right side of it can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in hard-earned lessons.