A pair of Huntsville cowboys went into Saturday’s championship go-round hoping to win a national title.
Young Brody Beaver did what his dad has done so many times on pro rodeo’s biggest stage. He won a national championship.
Beaver, the 18-year-old son of eight-time PRCA world champion cowboy Joe Beaver, posted what he called a “very average” score of 210 Saturday in the short go at the National High School Finals Rodeo, which concluded a weeklong run in Farmington, N.M.
That score allowed Beaver to walk away with the championship after compiling the top average in the boys cutting horse competition.
“Thankfully I marked big enough scores in the first two rounds that I didn’t have to score real big tonight,” Beaver said before claiming his trophy saddle, buckle and college scholarship check.
“It’s good — I’m excited. Along with this comes the prestige of being called the National High School Rodeo Association, or NHSRA, boys cutting champion.”
Beaver showed as well as he could have in the first two rounds. He scored 218.5 and placed second in the first go Monday, then he recorded a 218 score and finished first in the second go Friday.
Those two impressive scores put Beaver into the final round and gave him some breathing room in the finals.
Beaver scored a 210 for sixth place in the championship performance, but because he had ridden so well in the first two go-rounds, he came away a national champion.
“It was really rough tonight,” Beaver said on his cell phone shortly after his short-go performance. “A lot of people lost their cattle. Six out of 11 lost their cow in the first bunch, and five out of 10 lost their cow in the second bunch that I was in.
“I just went into survival mode when I saw what was going on out there tonight.”
Going into his first NHSFR, Huntsville’s Taylor Price felt confident about his chances of winning a national title in bareback riding.
“I’m just planning on winning,” Price said prior to the rodeo. “I’m really confident about what I can do.”
Price, a junior at Huntsville High School, found out that winning the coveted NHSFR buckle and top prize money turned out to be more difficult than originally thought.
For his first time out, it was a good effort, though. In the championship performance, Price scored a 66, which helped net him a ninth-place finish with an average score of 202.
JR Vezain of Cowley, Wyo. won the bareback title with an average of 223. Yance Day of Tahlequah, Okla., came in second at 217, followed by AJ St. Goddard from Browning, Mont., with a 215.
Price, who won the state championship in Abilene in June, advanced to the short go at the NHSFR after scoring a 75 and a 65 in the first two go-rounds.
Price went into the championship round tied for eighth in average and was the lone Texan in the bareback riding finals.
