11-5-2024
Billy Smith is the Commissioner of the National Reining Horse Association in Oklahoma City, a worldwide membership organization that celebrates the reining discipline.
He has previously held executive positions with the American Paint Horse Association and the American Quarter Horse Association, prior to more than 10 years as a non-fiction writing professor at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas. He has held board positions with the American Horse Council, United States Livestock Genetics Export, Inc. and Tarleton State University Equine Production Advisory Board.
An undergraduate of the University of North Texas, he began his career as a general assignments reporter that included a stint covering the central American wars in the 1980s. He completed two master’s degrees and a doctorate from Texas Tech University. He was a finalist for the American Long-Form Newspaper Narratives writing award given at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference for his work chronicling his orphaned grandfather’s rise from abject poverty in rough boomtowns of southern Arkansas in the early 1900s.
He’s been married for more than 40 years….to the same woman, Mindy Moreland Smith. They have two children, Lauren, who, along with her husband, practices law in New York and a son, Hunter, a decorated combat veteran of the Marine Corp Special Operations Command in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and North Africa. He now works in security.
NRHA represents 15,000 reining horse enthusiasts around the world who compete for more than $25 million in purse money. It’s premier Derby and Futurity are both held in Oklahoma City