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GILLETTE, Wyo. — This was supposed to be Shaylee Thacker’s year.

And breakaway calf roping was supposed to be her event. The Lehi Rodeo Club member had placed second in the girl’s roping event at last year’s National High School Finals Rodeo — and the young woman who beat her, New Mexico’s Kassidy Dennison, didn’t even qualify in the breakaway this time around. 

“I thought, ‘OK, so this is my time,’ ” Thacker said. “I wasn’t feeling like it was a sure thing or anything like that, but I felt confident because it’s my best event.”

But when the chute sprung open in Tuesday morning’s first go-round, Thacker and her horse, Silver, were just a split second ahead. The calf made a hard turn — and the cowgirl couldn’t get a good bead on it. 

“There were definitely a few tears,” she said. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

In her second go-round on Thursday evening, Thacker didn’t want to make the same mistake twice. She hesitated out of the gate — and never caught up to her quarry.

Thacker took a slow, quiet ride back to the stables in the west side of the arena. 

 

“You learn from it,” Thacker’s father, Shane, told his clearly disappointed daughter as she untacked her horse following the second breakaway miss. “That’s what you can always take away, no matter how things go.”

That wasn’t the only silver lining, though, because Thacker had also qualified for the national competition in pole-bending — and an unexpectedly strong finish in the first go-round of that event put her in third place going into Friday night’s second performance. 

A solid showing in the second go — marred only by Silver’s slight stutter step around the first pole — put her in fourth place, a half-second off leader Heather Hassler of Texas, going into Saturday evening’s championship short round.

It was still going to be a hard fight to the title — a half-second in pole bending isn’t an insurmountable lead, but it amounted to a significant head start for Hassler. 

Still, Thacker’s disappointing breakaway performance was long forgotten. 

“I’m over it,” Thacker said with a laugh on Friday evening as she perched on a railing overlooking the arena where she would ride the following night. “It’s gone. I’m not even thinking about it anymore. I’m totally focused on what’s in front of me.”

And missing the breakaway finals meant having one less to stress her 12-year-old quarter horse, who was also pressed into service under Thacker’s brother, a tie-down roper.

“He’s getting a little more rest now,” Shaylee Thacker said. “We’re going to give him some good grain and tomorrow, he’ll be ready to run.”

And he was. When Thacker’s Saturday night performance came, Silver bolted out the gate and came around the last pole with a head full of steam.

The run was feeling good, Thacker said. 

And then: Letdown. Silver dropped his head and nudged the end pole. 

“I don’t know what happened,” she said minutes after the run, in which she accepted a 10-second penalty for hitting the pole. “I don’t know what happened, that’s always been a pole we take wide… my stomach just dropped.” 

But Thacker, heeding her father’s advice from the breakaway, was already looking for lessons.

And once again, the lesson wasn’t hard to find: When one door closes, another often opens.  Thacker’s strong showing in what she believed to be her weaker event has given her something else to dream about for next year.

Which, she now has even better reason to believe, will be her year.

• Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant professor of journalism at Utah State University.

 

 

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