The way Hayden Segelke remembers it, she first got on a horse when she was 3. And not long afterward, she fell off a horse and suffered a cracked skull.
“It took me awhile to get back on a horse and not be scared,” Segelke said this week from the site of the National High School Finals Rodeo in Farmington, N.M.
Not too long. She began competing in small weekly rodeos at age 5. By now, at 15, the Brush High School sophomore-to-be is fearless.
The oldest of four children in one of Colorado’s most prominent rodeo families, Segelke is taking her first crack at the renowned national high school competition in Farmington.
Last year, Hayden won barrel racing at the Wrangler Junior High Finals Rodeo, and she and her sister Paxton, now 14, were 1-2 in the All-Around Cowgirl competition at the national event.
It almost certainly won’t happen this year, in Hayden’s introduction to the high school category, but she is considered a bona fide threat to become one of the first rodeo competitors to win a championship in both the junior high competition, which began in 2005, and the long-running high school division.
Both events are under the umbrella of the Denver-based National High School Rodeo Association, which actually also has sub-associations in, and draws competitors from, Canada and Australia. Bull rider Colby Scallions of Itasca, Texas, just south of Dallas, became the first to pull off the junior and senior high double a year ago.
After her second and final qualifying “go-round” in goat-tying Thursday night in the national competition — which draws more than 1,500 competitors and awards about $325,000 in college scholarships — Hayden was in 14th place in the event and had a good chance of being among the 20 girls to make the Saturday “short-round” finals. She was in 46th place in her other event, breakaway roping, after the first go-round, and her second go-round is tonight. Also, after the first go-round in all events, she was in third place in the point standings in the All-Around Rookie Cowgirl category.
“Anytime you’re competing, it’s fun,” Hayden said. “But there’s also other things to do. We play volleyball, and there are dances every night. … The people here from Colorado all know each other, and we’re all pretty good friends.”
A true rodeo family
Considering her genes, neither her involvement nor her success at rodeo is much of a shocker.
Hayden’s father, Tim Segelke, finished second in the All-Around Cowboy competition at the NHSFR in Rapid City, S.D., in 1985. He went on to compete at the University of Wyoming, where he met his wife, Vickie, also a rodeo competitor, then had a long career as a professional cowboy in the Mountain States circuit of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. He was best known as a steer wrestler and made the National Finals Rodeo in 1990 and 1998 in that event.
The Segelkes live on the family ranch in Snyder, near Brush, and raise, train and sell rodeo horses. Vickie also teaches elementary school.
“My dad, Francis, rodeoed in the ’50s,” said Tim, 41, who was minding the ranch in Snyder. “My older brother, Bruce, is 13 years older than I am, and he was a professional. . . . I didn’t have a lot of interest in rodeo when I was little. I liked the farming more. As I got older and bigger, I started steer wrestling and I got bit by the bug when I was about 12 or 13. I started roping and everything else.”
Years after his brother won an event at the National Western Stock Show rodeo, Tim did the same thing. He retired from competition in 2004.
“It just got too hard to travel,” he said. “My idea of rodeoing always has been to combine the training and selling of horses, and the competition was a way to promote our horses. Now the girls are busy enough. We still have our old friends from rodeos, and it’s fun to go now because our friends’ kids and our kids are all rodeoing together now, too.”
Appreciating athleticism
Hayden also plays basketball, and gave softball a shot as well. “But I was just too busy,” she said.
There isn’t much doubt which of her sports she believes involves more athletic skill. Yes, that’s rodeo.
“You have to be in pretty good shape,” she said. “When you’re getting off the horse in the goat-tying, you can dislocate your knee or do something else. If you’re not in shape, you can really get hurt.”
She hopes to parlay her rodeo skills into a college career at Texas A&M, where she could study equine science. He goals from there are to rodeo professionally and open a horse hydrotherapy clinic.
Hayden’s and Paxton’s sister Quincy is 10, and she was second in the All-Around Cowgirl category in the Little Wranglers international event for 5- to 8-year-olds in 2006. Son Holden, 2, is likely to be involved soon.
“We like to think of all this as a preparation for life’s circumstances, using rodeo as a tool,” Tim said. “It prepares them for the high points and the low points. Every time you make a run, or every calf that you take, one day it’s diamonds and the next day it’s coal. Using rodeo, they learn on a daily or weekly basis, and you’re prepared when things don’t quite work out right in whatever avenues of life they decide to go down — rodeo, agriculture, or business.”
Terry Frei: 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com
