So I know there is a horsereset item that will reset your horse to lvl 1.

I am currently levelling a horse and even though it had 3 starting skills it is currently lvl 26 and has .... 14 skills.

So it only got 11 skills in 26 levels (just plain terrible).

If I reset the horse to lvl 1 will it keep the 3 skills it came with? 

It was a T8 event horse.

Never used the horse reset so no idea how it works.

Welcome to the fresh hell of horse training!

14 skills is not even bad if you haven't been using skill change coupons as you level, unfortunately.

I've never reset a horse, so I don't know if the skill changes to a random starter skill or not, and even if it did, this is an event horse, so it might be different.

You might be better off just leaving the horse as is and buying a courser from the market if that's what you are after.

Was hoping to finally have a close to perfect (aka almost all skills) horse but yeah guess I better just sent it to the glue factory 

To do that is likely to require leveling several T8s. You won't get there without using horse skill change coupons regardless, but the guides in the horse discord suggest that you not use any horse skill change coupons if your horse doesn't have 11 - 14 skills by level 15, because it's a "dumb" horse and won't learn skills fast enough to be worth spending money on. And of course, it's lucky of the draw whether you get a smart horse or a dumb one, so there's a good chance that you'll need to train several T8s before you find one that isn't dumb.

Being able to turn a T8 event horse into a courser could be easier based on the fact that they gave you some skills for free, but it's still going to rely heavily on whether the horse is smart or dumb, and the fact that it starts out with extra skills could actually make the 11 - 14 rule wrong by making the horse look smarter than it actually is. Either way, I don't know if resetting it will make it retain its additional skills, and I don't know if reseting a horse will have any effect on whether it's smart or dumb (though someone in the horse discord may now). Normally, I've seen people resetting horses to fix the luck they got on horse stats, not skills, and usually, that's only worth doing on a dream horse.

Realistically, if all you want is a T8 courser with decent stats and skills, you're better off simply buying it. The same goes for a dream horse. You take the luck out of the equation (beyond the luck of finding a good horse to buy), and you avoid having to spend real money. Usually, the suggestion is to not bother trying to make your own T8 courser or dream horse unless you want that achievement or simply like the horse content, because it's very time-consuming, and you're almost certainly going to have to spend real money on mount skill change coupons during the process.

If you already have a Reset Mount Growth coupon from attendance rewards or something, then you can certainly try your luck at resetting the T8 that you have, but you'll need to then have mount skill change coupons to get anywhere near all of the skills even if it's a smart horse and even if it does retain its extra skills (which it may or may not). Most folks actually doing horse training wouldn't use a Reset Mount Growth coupon on a T8 though. They'd keep it for a dream horse.

Reset (back to lvl1 with 1 random skill) will probably give you at the end +/-  an equal horse cause results depend of your gear, your horse-training level, and the "nature" of the horse (some are better for stats increasing, some for gaining skills), not only "luck" at each level. For this reason, for me Resets are not interesting stuffs, except to retry a levelling after a good gear/lifeskill up (for an old horse that didn't reach decent performances for eg.) or a total miss with a T9. 

Your question wasn't about Coursiers/awak but if it's what you look for : one of the needed skills for coursiers has an insane droperate, so better is to reach at least 15~16 skills to reduce the risk of boring loops between the easiest-droprate ones (or be prepared for pain spending big amounts of real money).  Maybe try to finish levelling this one to 30 before (sometimes you can have luck on the last levels). If not, breed or buy another and try again.

Except if you absolutely want to do it by yourself, buying directly a coursier is probably the best choice.