story by Ruth Nicolaus
Lindsey Temple goes crazy if she has to sit in the house, so she makes sure she’s busy doing something nearly all the time.
The Colorado High School Rodeo Association member lives near La Garita, Colo., and when she’s not competing, she’s in school or helping around the family ranch.
In high school rodeo, she competes in the reined cow horse and the cutting.
She grew up on the back of a horse, but when a neighbor, Blue Allen, mentioned to her dad one day that he thought Lindsey and her sister Shelby might enjoy the cow horse competition, her dad jumped at the chance.
“My dad was happy, because he likes good horsemanship and he loves horses. He loved the idea of the cow horse competition, so he set both of us up in it.” The cow horse segued into the cutting.
In addition to being a high school rodeo athlete, Lindsey competes in the National Reined Cow Horse Association and the Colorado Reined Cow Horse Association. Sometimes she misses high school rodeos to attend NRCHA and CRCA events.
She has two reined cow horses she uses. Red, a ten-year-old gelding who belongs to her sister, is “the best horse I’ve ever ridden, by far,” she said.
Her other reined cow horse is a lease horse, a mare named Miss Jewel. Jewel has some areas she needs working on, but that helps Lindsey as well. “She needs to learn to listen to me, to what my hands and body say,” she said. “She also needs to work on her cow work, because she likes to do it on her own. She can be sloppy and incorrect.” Lindsey finds that as she and Jewel work on technique, it helps her improve as well.
Her cutting horse is Missy, the “most laid-back horse I’ve ever ridden,” she said. “She’s super good at her job, is really smooth, and listens to me till it’s her turn to do her own thing.”
A senior at Sargant High School, Lindsey loves her small school and all of her classes. But her favorite, if she had to choose one, is US Government class. Sometimes the teacher allows students the chance to share their opinions on politics, which Lindsey enjoys. “We have a few kids who are opinionated so it’s super fun to watch them argue back and forth, and for me, it’s fun to listen to.”
Her least favorite class is College English, mostly because it’s an online class. “I absolutely hate online classes,” she said. “It’s super hard to stay focused and motivated, and to get feedback when you need it. (With online learning) you don’t get the one-on-one interaction that I like to have.”
In school, Lindsey is on the knowledge bowl team and an FFA member. She’s on her chapter’s animal science team and participated at state her sophomore year.
The best trip she’s taken was to Fort Collins with the FFA chapter. She really enjoyed her classmates, and they had a lot of fun “the adults don’t need to know about,” she quipped.
She carries her share of the load on the family ranch, the T Heart Ranch. They raise commercial and registered Angus and Simangus cattle.
After high school, she’d like to pursue a doctor of veterinary medicine degree and has already been accepted to five different colleges.
In her spare time, she enjoys movies from the 1980s and ‘90s, like The Breakfast Club, The Goonies, The Lost Boys, and the Sandlot.
Last year was her second year of high school rodeo competition, and she finished second at state in the cutting and third in the cow horse, qualifying for the National High School Finals Rodeo in both events. At Nationals, both of her first-round runs were good; she finished in the top fifteen in the cutting and the top twenty in the cow horse. The second-round runs weren’t so good: in the cutting, she had some technicalities which knocked her score “into the dirt,” and in the cow horse, her horse fell down, going down the fence, which was an automatic disqualification.
Lindsey’s older sister, Shelby, is a freshman at Clarendon (Texas) College. Her younger sister, Ashley, is twelve, and her younger brother, Coy is nine.
She is the daughter of Shane and Beth Temple.