WARD & HAWKINS REWRITE JAKE & CLAY’S NFR AVERAGE RECORD
Remember Round 9 at the 2009 Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, when JoJo LeMond and Randon Adams were 3.4 to set a new NFR and world team roping record, and it lasted mere minutes before Chad Masters and Jade Corkill broke it again with a 3.3-second blur (which was tied last summer by Dustin Egusquiza and Travis Graves in Oakley City, Utah)? At the other end of the team roping record longevity spectrum was Jake Barnes and Clay Cooper’s 59.1-second NFR average record set way back in 1994. It took 27 years to rewrite that one. But Andrew Ward and Buddy Hawkins finally cracked the code at the 2021 NFR, and set the new mark of 54.7 on 10.
“We consider ourselves a team with a high catch rate,” said Andrew, 31, who lives in Edmond, Oklahoma, with his wife, Hayli. “I’ve also been very fast with Buds—we were 3.5 at Coleman Proctor’s Mock NFR roping in Tulsa in November, and 3.6 at the rodeo in San Angelo—but it’s both of our natures to catch.
“We make a lot of controlled runs. We don’t practice a lot together, but we jackpot together. And we see roping similarly. So when we’re apart, we’re working on things like getting control of our horses, so we compete better as a team. We make a lot of slower runs separately when we’re home, and it seems like our run keeps getting better.”
Same seems to go for long averages—like, say, the 10-header in
