Back To Back

Cole Wheeler and Wesley Thorp win their secondstraight national collegiate championships in Casper.

- Julie Mankin

Want to know how tough it is to defend a national team-roping championship in college rodeo? For about the first 30 years of the annual College National Finals Rodeo (CNFR), nobody did it. Then, for 33 years after J.D. Yates won the 1980-81 titles for the University of Southern Colorado, nobody did it.

Now, not long after Tarleton State’s Billy Bob Brown and Eastern New Mexico University’s Logan Medlin were able to win the 2013-14 titles, defending champions Cole Wheeler and Wesley Thorp of Texas Tech University matched the feat. Wheeler and Thorp were on a mission at the 69th Annual CNFR, June 11-17 in Casper, Wyo., where they once again bested the top teams from 10 other geographic regions to win the back-to back championship.

“Those boys have always roped amazing,” said Texas Tech rodeo coach Stetson Corman. “They’re just winners. They find a way to win, whether it’s on a good or bad draw.”

Wheeler and Thorp, who won the championships last year for Weatherford College and Ranger College, respectively, won the titles this time by catching four steers in the Casper Events Center in 25.2 seconds.

“Last year, we had a four-second lead,” said Wheeler. “This year, it was a lot closer. We weren’t high call, and we’d have to beat the team ahead of us.”

The pair had jumped out with a 6.1 in Monday-morning slack for second place in the first round. Two more similar runs sent them to the lead on three head with a 19.3 (tied with Gillette College’s Cooper Wright and Riley Wakefield). But then Southern Region champs Ty Arnold and Mason Boettcher came tight in 6.5 on their third steer to edge ahead by a tenth of a second heading into the short round.