Bailey Bates was a high school ag teacher who quit her job to breakaway rope professionally.
“I saved up some money and turned in my resignation,” she said. “I gave myself three years to make the Finals and, if it didn’t happen, at least when I’m older I could say I tried.”
After an agonizing 18th-place finish in 2024, she thought Year No. 3—this one—would be her year. She’d gotten into the buildings, and both she and her black horse were now seasoned. On her grade gelding Rocket, Bates had won two of her three Indian National Finals Rodeo championships and just this spring had clocked a 1.9 in three different rounds in San Angelo, Texas. He had been a cheap 5-year-old ranch horse advertised on Facebook when she bought him during the pandemic.
Fast-forward to July 20, following Bates’ runs in Salinas. She’s up in Cheyenne the next morning, but her brother already has her rig in Wyoming. So, she catches a ride for the overnight drive with some team ropers. On the way out of town, the little group pulls over at Tractor Supply to buy shavings, and unloads the horses to bed the trailer. When Rocket backs out, he steps on the rubber protector and his hind foot goes all the way through to the pavement between it and the trailer. He’s caught, thrashing to get free and sliding around on the pavement. Finally, the whole thing breaks away.
Not being in her own rig, Bates doesn’t even have Bute. The horse’s leg is cut so deep it’s a mangled mess.
“I was so sure that 2025 was our year,” said Bates. “And the day before the biggest week of the season, he gets hurt? In that moment, all you can do is pray.”
Of course, it was Sunday. So, local vets would have needed to keep Rocket overnight. Bates and the others hit the road. Her first call was to Mandi Holland, DVM. The fellow breakaway roper from Red Lodge, Montana, told her to haul the horse to South Valley Equine in Utah, to see if the joint or any tendons or ligaments were involved.
What’s notable is that Bates was never mad at the trailer. In fact, she’s thankful the owners of it happened to be with her when it happened.
“Luckily I was with friends, and they told me it was going to be okay,” she recalled.
Then, 30 minutes down the highway, their truck broke down. Finally, they found someone to lend them a truck so they could continue east. In the meantime, Dr. Holland was relieved the Utah x-rays showed no joint or ligament involvement in Rocket’s injuries.
“That was the second bullet dodged,” Holland said. “The first bullet dodged was the fact he didn’t break his right hind leg.”
She had two other fears unfounded—that he’d be septic soon from infection or the bone would die from the trauma.
“I said, ‘Bailey, we have to get him off the road and you can’t send him home,’” Holland recalled.
She arranged for her own father to pick up the horse from Bates’ brother, who was headed through Dillon, Montana, to some Canadian rodeos. Dr. Holland’s dad drove Rocket to the home of her favorite vet-tech, Candy Wilcox, who owns an equine care and rehabilitation facility called RX Equine in Twin Bridges, Montana. Rocket would be there 45 days.
“From the start, Mandi talked me through everything and told me not to worry; that he just needs time,” Bates said.
The two had happened to sit on a fence near each other once at a pro rodeo and became friends.
“My parents both grew up on Montana reservation land,” said Holland, who has an admitted soft spot for Native girls. “Sometimes I’ll be watching the start and a girl will ride up and ask me to come look at her horse. The others around me will say they forgot I’m a vet.”
In Cheyenne, Bates roped on her brother’s bulldogging horse and placed. Over the next few weeks with that horse, although Bates still had a chance at NFBR 2025, she knew something had to change. She talked to friends about her next move. Should she just go home? Stay out on the road with the bulldogging horse? That’s when Bates called Ariana Varishetti about leasing Reno – the horse Lari Dee Guy had let her run a few calves on that spring.
Varischetti didn’t even hesitate. Her “yes” was immediate when Bates asked if she could ride Reno to finish her season. Everyone knows Bates broke an arena record on him almost immediately and won even more than she needed at Sioux Falls to realize her NFR dream. But before that? There were a ton of broken barriers.
“He’s real deceiving from the corner,” admitted Varischetti. “He fires hard and pulls through your hand and it took her a while to figure that out. I was trying to keep her positive in the midst of all these things that kept happening to her. I’d tell her, ‘At the end of the season, this barrier won’t even matter.”
As for Dr. Holland, she kept reassuring Bates that her No. 1 horse was coming back.
“Don’t worry—you just get to the NFR,” was Holland’s mantra. “You do your job and I’ll do my job. Just handle your end of this.”
But the vet had quite a job. She shipped tons of bandaging supplies to Wilcox’s place, and drove to Twin Bridges to check on her patient when, about a month into his rehab, Rocket got bored and kicked his stall. His hock was so swollen, Dr. Holland had to re-start him on antibiotics. She treated Rocket like her own horse, careful not to worry Bates. In the meantime, she knew Bates was fighting penalties on Reno, so when Bates drove through Montana to check on Rocket, Dr. Holland found her some calves and a place to do some scoring.
Rocket got to come home in September. But he soon banged his hock again, so Dr. Holland walked Bates through getting him over that. But thereafter, the wound still just wouldn’t completely close.
“We had heard about Anicell, which is an injectable stem cell treatment out of Chandler, Arizona,” said Holland. “After she’d gotten Rocket in shape, we found someone to do a graft on the site, inject the Anicell, and she gave him 10 days off. I didn’t charge her, figuring it was an experimental treatment. But it worked like a charm.”
In the meantime, the doc kept up the encouragement.
“I told you I would get Rocket to the NFR,” Holland told Bates. “Now you need to make it. I haven’t given up! Neither can you.”
Much like what happened the day her horse got hurt, Bates used her faith to turn her mindset around after her no-time in the first round at Sioux Falls. She reminded herself she was still in the hunt, and decided to feel proud instead of defeated. With every calf at Sioux Falls, Bates cut her rope shorter. It worked. She made the Top 15 headed to Las Vegas.
Bates had gotten to practice on Rocket and took him to one rodeo before November’s EHV outbreak stuck everyone at home. Her dream – her first-ever National Finals – wasn’t just postponed, it was moved out of Las Vegas.
“That’s what we work for – Las Vegas is part of what you envision when you’re going down the road all year,” Bates said. “But nobody had control of that. So, it’s like, okay, how do I roll with this punch?”
Nobody, it appears, rolls better than Bates. Super excited for the Million-Dollar Breakaway in Scottsdale, she hauled both horses there and won the Last Chace Qualifier after going 7.2 seconds on three to earn more than $8,000.
“It was another dream to have a chance to rope for $25,000 go-rounds,” she said of the Kimes Ranch event. “Just the opportunities that come with that money! It goes a long way on the res.”
And now she’ll hit Cowtown to try for more, with two great horses in her own trailer. Bates is proof that when nothing goes by plan, it works to lean on faith and belief. She said she gained some heaven-sent peace from those ropers she was with when Rocket got hurt, from her faith-filled conversations through late summer with Varischetti, from Dr. Holland’s positive energy, from her own family and even from Lari Dee and Hope going back to last spring.
“It’s been exciting to have gone through this season learning and growing in that sense – in faith,” Bates said. “There’s no way I could be here on my own; I didn’t have the mindset. If all those people weren’t in my village, this wouldn’t have happened—I wouldn’t be roping at the National Finals this week.”
