YODER—Anyone who doubts Hadley Thompson’s resolve needs only to look at a photo from one of her first rodeos.
Opinion
In the black-and-white picture, 7-year-old Thompson rounds a barrel with a fierce look of determination on her face. She steers her horse with her left hand and holds on to the saddle horn as best she can with her right, which is in a cast past her elbow.
The middle of eight siblings from a ranch outside Yoder, Thompson learned early on not to back down from a challenge. “My brothers told me to roll down this hill, so I did, and I broke my arm,” she told me. “I was pretty devastated because I still wanted to compete. I ended up getting to run barrels.”
She doesn’t remember how she placed that day, but winning wasn’t the point then.
It is now.
In 2024, Thompson qualified for the National High School Finals Rodeo as a sophomore with big expectations of herself in the world’s largest youth rodeo. She qualified for five different events, and the first-generation rodeo athlete planned to take home the world championship in two and earn All-Around Cowgirl honors.
Lofty expectations, by any standard.
When the week ended, Thompson had turned heads with three second-place finishes — breakaway roping, goat tying and all-around cowgirl. As an underclassman competing against the best high school rodeo athletes in the world, anyone would consider those results a success.
Anyone but her, that is.
“I know I should have been grateful, but I hate winning second so much,” she said. “It makes me madder to win second than it does third.”
Reporters wanted interviews with her, and although Thompson agreed, she questioned why they wanted to talk to a runner-up. When they congratulated her on her outstanding accomplishment, she thanked them but told them it wasn’t what she set out to do.
“I told everyone, ‘I’m winning first in all three of those next year’,” she said. “They smiled and said they were sure I would have a great year, but I don’t think anyone believed me.”
They clearly hadn’t seen that 7-year-old racing barrels in a fresh cast. The doubt fueled Thompson in the offseason.
Every day she trained, focusing on the minute details that could shave hundredths of a second off her times.
When she arrived at the 2025 National High School Finals Rodeo as a junior, Thompson put thoughts of redemption aside and trusted her muscle memory.
“The more you think, the worse it goes, honestly,” she said. “I was prepared. I just wanted to go out there and most importantly do my job.”
She trusted it would all work out, and it did: first in breakaway, first in goat tying and all-around cowgirl.
Thompson’s goal for her last National High School Finals Rodeo, which runs July 19-25 at the Sandhills Global Event Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, is hardly a mystery.
“If you’re going to do something, you might as well try to be the best at it,” she said.
Experience has also taught her results aren’t always in her control.
“There are quite a few aspects in rodeo that you can’t control, the stock you draw, the ground conditions, whatever it may be,” she said. “So I’ll do my job and at that point, whatever happens, happens.”
Many of the National High School Finals Rodeo competitors, like Thompson, will go on to compete in the professional circuit immediately after their high school career concludes in Lincoln this summer. Thompson plans to use the scholarship money she’s earned and work toward her degree at Southwest Texas College, while competing in college and professional rodeo concurrently.
She knows the balancing act can be tricky, but she’s seen her older sister Haiden manage the load to great success. In 2025 Haiden earned the coveted All-Around Cowgirl title at the College National Finals Rodeo in Casper and was also named 2025 Breakaway Resistol Rookie of the Year for being the top breakaway roping earner in her first professional season.
Unlike many rodeo athletes at the elite level, the Thompsons weren’t born into a legacy rodeo family and didn’t have access to professionally trained competition horses.
“My dad had rodeoed a little bit when he was younger, but we mainly grew up on a ranch, roping and doctoring and whatever we needed to do to help out,” Hadley said. “When my older sisters were in junior high, they got interested in rodeo and we started to go to more and more and more.”
It took off from there. Their parents supported them as much as they could, but the whole family understood it had to be a two-way street to work.
“Our parents, they were putting all this time and money and effort and all of these miles, trying their hardest to give us the best opportunity they could in the rodeo world,” Thompson told me. “If they were going to put that kind of work in, it was only fair that we tried our hardest to win and help pay our way down the road.”
They have. The Thompsons weren’t always a recognized name in the sport, but they are now.
While there’s no certainty in rodeo or any other head-to-head competition, everyone will be watching Thompson as she attempts to make history during her final high school rides in Lincoln.
This time, she’s no longer the kid with the cast or the underclassman with a chip on her shoulder. She’s a three-time world champion.
