Loni Kay Yates did not come from a rodeo family but after a play date with her best friend Callie and she was hooked.
Cindi Keeton helped Yates learn the fundamentals of barrel horses before she helped Yates’s dad find the horse that would become the first real barrel horse that Yates would run.
“Cindi trained him for me and after that I got a taste of what a real barrel horse was like and he was amazing. I wish I had him today because the type of horse he was, he would still be winning at the pro rodeos today. He was amazing,” Yates said.
Now, Yates is competitive in both breakaway roping and barrel racing.
Today, Yates ropes on a big red horse that she calls Boss. Once she really started entering him and the two gained confidence together, she says she never looked back and he has taken her places that she couldn’t ask for a better horse.
She runs barrels on a horse that she bred, started and trained named Grace. Grace is out of Yates’s mare, Alice, that took her to the College Finals before suffering a career ending injury. Yates always knew she wanted to breed horses and when her two barrel horses had career ending injuries at the same time, it gave Yates the opportunity to start her program. Breeding animals is something that is in her blood and Alice on her way to becoming a proven produce.
“She’s already produced Grace and then I have a couple colts that I’m training right now and they all have the same athleticness and they all have her fire, which is good and bad,” Yates says about Alice’s colts.
She says that breeding and training horses is what she wants to do for the rest of her life. Yates’s goal is to raise and train babies but if those babies turn out to be able to handle the pressure and thrive in the professional rodeo format, she’s okay with that too.
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