Quick Chat: Meghan Boenig

Meghan Boenig's coaching career began before she knew it, which is an odd way to get started.

Georgia's only equestrian coach — she has led the Bulldogs to six national championships since the program's first season in 2002-03 — Boenig was a graduate assistant working on a Ph.D. in Animal Science at Texas A&M when she was informed that she, along with current A&M coach Tana McKay (also a graduate assistant at the time), would be serving as co-head coaches of the new Aggies equestrian squad.

Boenig didn't grow up in a horse-mad family but she loved them from a very young age, eventually getting into equestrian and competing on the club team while attending Berry College in Rome, Ga. As she explains during this Quick Chat from her office at the UGA Equestrian Complex in Bishop, Boenig never expected to be where she is today, even if "horse" was, according to family lore, the first word she ever spoke.

Here's some of what she had to say:

Frierson: When I do those Chats with so many of your great student-athletes, I tend to start with a question about how they got started in riding. It seems that for most it was either a family passion already or it was something completely out of left field, so which was it for you?

Boenig: Weirdly enough, it was the first word out of my mouth.

Frierson: Horse?

Boenig: Horse. Not dad, not mom, supposedly it was horse — and my family had nothing to do with them. From Day One I begged and pleaded (for riding lessons) and got nowhere. We had a house in New York and there was a bridal trail behind the house, so I would see the horses and that only encouraged it more.

When I wasn't getting anywhere with my parents, I said that's fine, I'll go to ... my grandparents (laughs). That worked, as far as me getting lessons, and my parents eventually let me do more lessons at home, and it all built from there.

Nobody had any experience with horses within my immediate family, I was just very, very persistent.

Frierson: Do you know why horse was the first word out of your mouth?

Boenig: I don't remember, I really don't remember.

Frierson: Did you have a toy horse or something?

Boenig: Are you kidding? I still have the whole collection; they're all named. I had this childhood horse named Brownie that went everywhere with me. All of those things still exist, but I couldn't tell you the first one.

I can tell you my first lesson was on a horse named Itchy and I just fell in love there. If horse was my first word, as they say, and I'll claim it, I don't remember what brought that on.

Frierson: When did riding become something more than just a hobby for you?

Boenig: This was not what I was going to do with my life, I thought. I loved animals and horses, enough that I thought I was going to be a vet. ... I was a member of an organization called the American Pony Club, and it's a lot like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. You can advance in it enough that you become like an Eagle Scout, where you have all the testing and you progress through, and there's a teaching element to it.

I did that and I loved that and I had a passion for it, and I loved the teaching part of it. So that led me to thinking vet, teaching, something in that area. And then in college, I kept thinking in that area; I graduated with a biology degree and an animal science minor, and then I started looking at vet schools. I looked at some vet schools and realized, I don't know if that's exactly what I want to do.

I ended up going a research route and going for a Ph.D.; I was like, I can do a Ph.D. and I can teach, and I'll do the horse thing as a fun hobby. In my graduate assistantship at Texas A&M, I walked in and my professor said he wanted me to help with this and that, and you also have to do research and go to class — the typical G.A. life that they give you. And I said, "That's great, Dr. Potter, but my main focus was the Ph.D. work and staying on that track."

And then he says, "And by the way, I'd like you to come to a meeting tomorrow morning. You participated on the club team in college, right, at Berry, so I'd like for you to be at this meeting."

I showed up the next morning and there was a note on the whiteboard and a whole room of people, and on the whiteboard it said Tana (McKay) and Meghan Nolan, new co-head coaches of Texas A&M's equestrian team.

Frierson: Wait, you were a co-head coach before you knew you were a co-head coach?

Boenig: Yes, that was part of my graduate assistantship. It was the next add-on thing; I still taught classes, I still did research, I took classes, and I would coach — I think we started coaching each day at 6 o'clock at night, in the arena.

I did it, I loved it — I loved it more than the research, more than other parts of the teaching. I was not expecting it, I was just going to continue on and do my Ph.D., and I loved it. I feel very, very blessed and lucky that all that happened.

Frierson: That is an unusual path to coaching, when you have no idea that you've been appointed a coach of a team that you didn't know existed. How long did to take to get to the point that you felt like you knew what you were doing?

Boenig: Oh, none of us did. The good thing was that none of us knew anything in that kind of spot – you don't even know what you don't know (laughs). Looking back on it, it was absolutely crazy, but they didn't know either, so we made up things as we went.

I'd taught before through the Pony Club and through a lot of other things, and I'd always ridden and always lessoned, but I'd never coached — not this kind of coaching — and the organization was new, everything was new. We just figured things out as we went and really that's continued on through now. Every day we try and get a little bit better.

Frierson: What is your relationship with riding like now? Do you still get out and ride as often as you can?

Boenig: My relationship is different, I am not the rider I was before, by any means, and haven't been for a long time. That's unfortunate and I do miss it sometimes, I really do. But the part about the interaction with the horses and being by them, I love that part. And I love watching the riders be successful.

For example, today I was eating my apple at lunch and when I finished I got up with my apple core to go find a horse. I still love that interaction, so I'm not going to throw that core away. You go and pet and you touch and you interact. ... I have a very different relationship with horses than I once did, but that interaction is still there.

Frierson: What's something you could eat every day and never get tired of it?

Boenig: Pasta, unfortunately. Pasta, Mexican, all very, very good — definitely a carb person. My father is half Italian and half Irish, and the Italian side is his mom's side, so he did a lot of cooking growing up and he was very good at it.

Frierson: Is there a specific kind of pasta that you love the most?

Boenig: I'm known for my pesto, I make homemade pesto, so I do a lot of that. And occasionally I will make my own pasta, but that's so time consuming.

Frierson: If you weren't coaching equestrian for a living, would you be a vet somewhere, would you be teaching at a college — what do you think you'd be doing?

Boenig: I feel like I could have a lot of different lives (laughs). Believe it or not, I would maybe do something outside of the animals, maybe doing something with them as a hobby. I love art and design, so there's lots of times I've thought about picking art back up, a lot of impressionistic stuff.

I also love design, from architecture to some other things like landscaping, etcetera. I really enjoy doing that.

Frierson: That ties in with this huge construction project going on next door, the new clubhouse.

Boenig: Yeah, I don't think they were expecting me to get into this like I have been getting into it. ... There are lots of things that really get me thinking and I love digging into it — I love digging into those kinds of things.

(This Q&A was lightly edited for length and clarity.)

John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men's Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files. He's also on Twitter: @FriersonFiles and @ITAHallofFame.

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