Premier Women’s Rodeo commissioner Linsay Rosser Sumpter has spent years putting women’s rough stock, goat tying and pole bending back on a professional stage that had quit making room for them, and in November the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum will hand her the 2026 Tad Lucas Memorial Award for it—one year after Lari Dee Guy.
Her first reaction was to assume somebody had misdialed.
“Honestly, I asked them if they had called the wrong number,” Sumpter said. “What an amazing honor to receive the Tad Lucas.”
The museum named the Fowler, Colorado, cowgirl its Tad Lucas honoree in its August announcement of the National Rodeo Hall of Fame class. The award goes annually to a living woman whose actions uphold and promote Western heritage, and it carries the name of Tad Lucas, the bronc rider and trick rider who, by Sumpter’s account, helped build the Girls Rodeo Association into what is now the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association (WPRA).
“Tad was one of the women who was influential in the start of the GRA,” Sumpter said. “She was not only a bronc rider, but a trick rider and she helped produce rodeos and she was just instrumental in the rodeo business of all sides of it, from being a contestant to being instrumental in building what is now the WPRA.”
Following Lari Dee
Sumpter lands among what can be called a handful of the most prominent women in the industry—Lari Dee Guy, who received the award last November, Martha Josey in 2022 and Sumpter’s own aunt, Cindy Rosser, in 2019.
“I really was shocked. I just kind of don’t feel like I’ve done enough yet to deserve these awards,” Sumpter said. “And then I look back and see some of the things that I have done and I’m like, okay, well maybe I have started to make my mark on the industry and to help promote women in the industry and to help build up more opportunities for women in the industry.”
“Lari Dee was awarded it last year and she’s a trailblazer for women in breakaway roping and women in rodeo. So just to follow some of these women who have won it in the past, my aunt Cindy has won it and she’s kind of been my idol my whole life when it came to learning how to run barrels and just being part of rodeo for so long.”
The museum’s stage is family ground. Sumpter’s grandfather, Flying U Rodeo founder Cotton Rosser, received the Ben Johnson Memorial Award there in 2006.
“When my grandpa got the Ben Johnson at the National Cowboy Museum, I never thought that I would be in that room going to walk on a stage to get one of those awards,” she said. “I was of the generation that your rodeo career, if you weren’t a barrel racer, was over after college.”
The Work Behind the Award
The résumé the museum recognized is mostly other people’s opportunities. In five years running women’s rodeo’s biggest event—first as commissioner of the Women’s Rodeo World Championship, now the Premier Women’s Rodeo (PWR) under Professional Bull Riders ownership—Sumpter has pushed disciplines back onto a professional stage that had quit offering them.
“I mean, I pushed from day one that we needed to bring back women’s rough stock because they were dismissed in 2008,” she said. “There was no women’s organization that accepted them in and had a place for them. So, I started pushing then and finally got it done last year.”
Goat tying came next, on the same logic.
“That’s sad. It’s so sad because women work decades to become good at that craft,” Sumpter said.
Then pole bending, for the horses nobody had a home for.
“And then you think about the pole bending that how many horses did ladies have to sell when they graduated from high school because they needed to buy a barrel horse maybe to go to college on or they needed to buy another rope horse or they didn’t want their amazing 19, 20 second pole horse to just sit and rot in a pen because there wasn’t anywhere for them to go,” she said. “So, to bring those disciplines back, it’s been important to me that we all deserve a platform. We all deserve a place to be this environment of sisterhood in an inclusive place.”
That thinking drives PWR’s Pro, Challenger and Limited classifications, too—the structure that lets a summer-only breakaway roper chase the same $60,000 check as a cowgirl hauling 10 months a year.
“But what about the ladies that have worked really hard to be good at breakaway roping and then only go in the summer?” she said. “Don’t they deserve a chance to hold up a $60,000 check just as much as all of those ladies who are traveling down the road …”
Sumpter, who is in her 18th year at Otero College in La Junta, Colorado—15 as rodeo coach, now on the agriculture business faculty—also helped put 20 breakaway ropers in the middle of the cow horse and reining world at the inaugural Run For A Million Breakaway Roping Showcase in August, an event she is quick to say she cannot take credit for.
A Big Week in Oklahoma City
The Annie Oakley Society will present Sumpter its Trailblazer Award at the museum on Wednesday, Nov. 11, alongside Annie Oakley Award honorees Audrey Franz, Cheryl McMullen, Hedy Carter and Margie McMullen, the founders of Double D Ranch.
“But I mean, just think Annie Oakley,” Sumpter said. “She’s like the ultimate cowgirl and she’s the ultimate trailblazer.”
“All of these things kind of happen and you don’t really understand or know why,” she said. “When you’re in the trenches and you’re working and you just have your head down and you’re grinding away, I mean, you don’t think that people notice that these things kind of make you stop and take a deep breath and just feel truly honored and blessed that people do see the fruits of your labor kind of at this point.”
What’s Next
The Tad Lucas Memorial Award follows later the same week, presented at the Champions’ Dinner and Induction Ceremony during National Rodeo Hall of Fame Weekend, Nov. 13-14. Then Sumpter goes back to work: PWR’s Road to the Championship, a made-for-TV competition she says runs Dec. 17-20 at Cowtown Coliseum with every classification represented, feeds a series that airs into the 2027 championship.
She is careful about who gets the credit for any of it.
“It’s just a great honor and a blessing,” Sumpter said. “And to carry on the traditions that Tad set forth of making women have a spot at the table for rodeo is huge and I’m just very honored and blessed.”
Hear the full conversation with Linsay Rosser Sumpter on The Breakdown, the official podcast of The Breakaway Roping Journal and CalfRoping.com.
