GIRL GANG

There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason for why girl champs are such a rarity in the team roping at the National High School Finals Rodeo, and yet, only three have been recorded in its history, which lists the sport’s first champions in 1972. Fourteen years later, Brenda Youtsey (now Reay) from Oregon would be the first girl in history to claim the title. Another 20 years would pass before Nevada’s Haylee Turlee would follow suit and, again, 14 more years until Quincy Sullivan, from New Mexico, joined her predecessors.

And though the reasons for these significant time gaps aren’t terribly obvious, what is known is that these three women went to the Finals to win.

GIRL GOALS

“That was my goal all along,” Brenda Reay said. “I knew that there had never been a girl.”

Since her senior year coup, Reay has raised two sons—Bryan, a professional team roper, and Trey, a college football athlete—with her husband, Mike. She’s spent her own professional years as a health teacher, and remembers getting the year-end print edition of the NHSRA records that dated back to the first Finals in 1949 and looking over them with her dad.

“I’m telling you, I knew that there had not been a girl since the ’40s. I knew it.”

It inspired her mission to be the first.

Haylee Turley, who hailed from Nevada as a high school senior and is now a third-grade teacher in Texas, where she’s raising her son, set her eyes on