Roper on the rise
Fallon Jones knows that when it comes to learning the ropes in a rodeo arena, family ties give her a heads-up advantage over most of her peers. Her mom, dad, aunt and grandfather all have had distinguished careers as exceptional team ropers and as neighbours living together on the same piece of Pineview property they go out of their way to help Jones and her younger sister Nevada carry on that tradition.
Thirteen-year-old Jones has been practicing her skills in breakaway roping, team roping and goat tying, working threeand-a-half hours a day to get ready for rodeo season and all that work is starting to pay off. She just got back from her first U.S. national junior high school rodeo finals in Huron, S.D., where she was one of 10 contestants from B.C. competing in an event that drew 1,100 junior high school-aged contestants from Canada, the U.S., Mexico and Australia.
“It was pretty nerve-wracking actually with so many competitors, and it was pretty tough competition, too,” said Jones. “My horses did really good.”
Jones took two of her horses, Pooh Bear and Gordon, on the four-day haul to South Dakota and was happy with both of them. Pooh Bear, a 13-year-old, hates running through the rope that starts the clock in breakaway so that means Gordon, a nine-yearold who will run through just about anything, gets that call.
She rode Pooh Bear in the goat tying event and got both her goats down, placing 79th out of 147.
Jones was hoping to get placings in all three events but with so many competitors the chances of drawing cooperative livestock to lasso was diminished. At any rodeo there are only so many goats and calves willing to get tied up without kicking up a fuss.
“I only got one of my (breakaway) steers down,” said Jones.
In team roping, Jones took on header duties riding a borrowed horse while Kali Clair-Atkins of Fort St. John roped heels riding Pooh Bear, but they had trouble catching their steers and finished with a no-time in each run. Jones will be back with her usual roping partner, Cashlyn Callison of Fort St. John, at the Canadian junior high school finals in Merritt.
Payton Hinton of Prince George also qualified for the Canadian finals.
While she was in South Dakota, Jones met some of the Mexican riders in her events – the first time she’s encountered a language barrier at a rodeo.
“They were a little hard to understand, I know no Spanish,” said Jones, who attended Pineview elementary school and will be moving on to Grade 8 classes in September at PGSS.
B.C. has never hosted the high school rodeo national finals and Jones can’t wait for her chance to perform in Merritt, July 27-29. She qualified third in breakaway and goat tying at the provincial championships in Hudson’s Hope and was seventh in team roping. Only the top four move on to nationals but Jones has been bumped into a spot at nationals in team roping because not all of the top four will be going to Merritt.
“It’s pretty exciting,” she said. “They usually have good rough stock and my horses like the arena so I think I’ll do good there.”
After seeing firsthand in Huron how big of an event a high school rodeo can be and what it can do to fray nerves, Jones is ready for just about anything now.
“It’s good just to go for the experience so next year you know more about it and the competition,” she said. “Just because I went to Huron, now all these little events aren’t such a big deal.”
Jones prefers being the header in team roping because it requires
B.C. has never hosted the high school rodeo national finals and Jones can’t wait for her chance to perform in Merritt, July 27-29.
more horsepower to keep the line tight. Breakaway is her favourite event and that has everything to do with her sidekick, Gordon.
“I just like the horse I ride because he’s so young and he’s working so good for such a young age,” she said.
Her commitment to the Little Britches rodeo circuit will mean Jones will be in Williams Lake and will miss the two-day team roping/barrel racing events in Prince George at the BC Northern Exhibition at Exhibition Park, Aug. 18-19. But she will get to ride close to home the previous weekend, Aug. 11-12, at the Prince George Tim Hortons Little Britches Rodeo at Nukko Lake. She’s in Merritt this weekend for a Little Britches event.
Jones knows how lucky she is to have in-house teachers as accomplished as the Suter/Jones clan. Her mom Christine won the B.C. team roping championship in 2015. Christine’s sister Sandy Suter (Jones’s aunt) has competed several years for the World Series team roping championships in Las Vegas and has qualified again in December. Jones’s grandpa, Gary Suter, is also one of the best in the province and he competes through the winter months in Arizona. Jones’s dad, Darren, also team ropes as a heeler.
“A lot of people go to clinics for everything and I have parents and my grandpa all around me who help me every night when I rope,” said Jones. “Every night’s like a new lesson for me – we rope three hours a night and I rope the (hay) bail 45 minutes a day.
“It’s a huge difference from maybe learning a couple things a couple times a year in a clinic. I get so much stuff every single night.”