Tom has been training horses professionally for 25 years. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls with a bachelor’s degree in Animal Science in 1978. He was the Horse Herdsman and helped teach the colt training class at UWRF from 1985 to 1995. In 1995, he moved to Michigan as the trainer at Cold Spring Farm in Maple City. The chance to start a number of reining-bred two year olds was the focus of this position. From 1995 to 2003, Tom started seven NRHA Futurity Finalists, showing one of them. He and his wife, Peggy, recently bought a house in Traverse City and moved the business to a new barn on Old Mission Peninsula. Tom and Peggy, an elementary music teacher, have two children; Carrie (23) is teaching high school in Bozeman, Montana and Joel (21) is a junior at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.