About Solo Select Horses — Texas Performance Horse Sales, Breeding & Stallions

Melanie Smith didn't grow up in a horse family. She grew up in Wichita Falls, and the fire got lit early: her first rodeo at five, watching the rodeo queen and the horses, was all it took. On her tenth birthday she found a newspaper ad for Whispers of Hope Horse Farm, a therapeutic riding center, and started volunteering every hour she could get. After years of that, and no small amount of begging, her parents finally bought her a horse of her own, a gaited gelding. “I remember getting on this gaited horse, running him across the wheat field and telling my mom that he was the one because he was so fast.”

The horse came with a condition. Her dad's rule was that it had to pay for itself, so she made her own flyers and started advertising hay hauling and riding lessons to cover his keep. The lessons caught on. By high school and through college she was teaching around forty-five kids of her own, a real business built one student at a time while everyone else her age was just riding. The pattern of her whole career was already there: earn the horse, prove the horse, put in the work nobody sees, and build something out of it.

She kept climbing the hard way. She rode with barrel racers and calf ropers, which led to a job loping horses for the Crumpler brothers in the cutting pen. That's where she found her opening. She started buying their cutting rejects, good horses that were never going to win a futurity, and making them into barrel horses, then selling them online back when almost no one in the Western performance world was selling horses online at all. She did all of it, the lesson kids included, while she was in nursing school, splitting every day between the barn and the books. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing, worked about a year as a registered nurse in a Level 1 trauma center, and then walked away from a career most people would have played it safe with. In 2016 she left the hospital for good and bet everything on horses.

In 2018 that bet became Solo Select, a handful of leased stalls run to one plain principle she has never softened:

That standard, in the workups, the presentation, and the follow-through, is what brought buyers back and moved her up to better and better horses. When Facebook shut down her sales page in 2020 for selling animals, she didn't hunt for a workaround. She built her own platform and kept going.

She didn't build it alone. Ty Smith, her partner in the business, is a horseman's horseman. As a youth he showed in cutting, cowhorse, and roping, and he came up under the legendary Doug Carpenter. He became the student of a tough game: picking horses that were winners. In recent years he has quietly been behind almost every record-setting sale in the Western performance horse world. At Solo Select, Ty directs the outside and Melanie directs the inside. Every barn, every building, and the workflow that moves horses through an operation this size carries his design, and he can see what a colt will become before the rest of the world does. Together, they have built Solo Select into what it is today.

Today Solo Select spans more than 1,500 acres of Gainesville, Texas ranch land, with 400 stalls, a climate-controlled stallion station, and one of the largest recipient mare herds in the world, supported by a team of more than a hundred people across the family of businesses. It has sold over $100 million in horses, including Crosby Ray Von at $1.7 million, the highest price ever paid for a Western performance horse at public auction. It is the same standard Melanie set in a few borrowed stalls in 2018, held to the same line she held when a single horse had to pay for himself in a Wichita Falls wheat field.