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Celina native Colton Hay rides his horse Kate in a pole bending race. Hay, 10, has run barrel racing and pole bending for four years and recently went to a national competition in Texas.
Photo by Randy Williams
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down sports four years ago, then-6-year-old Colton Hay had to find an alternative to his sport of choice, harness racing.
He kept to an equestrian theme, pivoting to barrel racing and pole bending, and last month, Colton, now 10, saw the continuing fruits of those labors as he made his third trip to a national tournament, the Hooey Junior Patriot in Fort Worth, Texas.
"I kind of like them the same," he said of his original passion, harness racing, "but barrel racing a little more."
COVID restrictions kept Colton from being around harness racing teams, with only trainers and drivers permitted.
Barrel racing had fewer restrictions and allowed him to start competing, and so he took his pony Hunter to Lancaster and got his first shot at Crazy Woman Ranch.
His first race wasn't exactly a success. The barrels were bigger than the pony, which was reluctant to run the pattern, and he froze up.
"Obviously they weren't fast," his mother, Emily Hay, said, "and it took him, you know, forever to like trot through this little pattern, but a lot of the people in the peewee, they'll like lead line em or they'll let him go.
"But it was funny because he was just out of his element," she went on, "because here at home, he was riding all over the place."
But he was willing to stick with it through a rough first year. When the pony wasn't good enough for him to continue to be competitive, his parents got him a 23-year-old horse to try to move up.
Horses in harness racing are retired when they're 15, so his mom reasoned that she might as well go with an older horse in case barrel racing didn't stick.
"So here we got this horse and she was 23," Emily Hay said, "and I was like, 'Well, okay, if he doesn't like it, she's 23. So maybe she doesn't have very many years left.' But he got so good that we're like, 'We wish she would have been younger.' "
Now, at 10, Colton has competed around Ohio and Indiana - his favorite place, he said, is Cowpokes Arena at C Bar C in Cloverdale, Indiana, because he had his fastest pole bending run there - and has gone as far afield as Florida and Minnesota.
At this point, he races nearly every weekend, often with a circuit called On the Road with Dawn and Clea.
"If he's not doing like the barrel shows, he's doing youth rodeos," Emily Hay said. "They would kind of fill in whenever we weren't at a barrel race. That's more rodeo-style stuff - goat tying, mini bull-riding or steer riding, breakaway roping, steer daubing, some events like that."
Barrel racing has riders try to run the fastest time possible in a cloverleaf pattern around three barrels; if they hit a barrel, five seconds are added to the final time.
Pole bending works similarly, as contestants ride back and forth between a line of poles aiming for the fastest time, with a penalty for hitting a pole.
In the younger competitions, for a particularly rocky run, contestants get a sympathy prize.
"A good run is, try not to hit anything," Colton said. "A bad run is - well, the saying we say is, 'If you get hit off three barrels, you get a piece of pizza.' But you really don't want to hit the barrels."
Unlike harness racing, where races are a set distance wherever they're held, barrel racing can vary by arena. At larger venues, the barrels might be in a longer pattern than at smaller ones. For pole bending, every race is the same.
Colton made his first trip to the Junior Patriot in 2022. To make this year's competition, he qualified with a pole-bending run of 26.75 seconds in the Hooey Bound Showdown held at the Champaign County Fairgrounds in Urbana in September, finishing second to advance.
Colton Hay poses with a logo for The Texan barrel race competition, where he competed in 2023.
At the beginning of March, they drove his two horses, Viv and Kate, 16 hours down to Fort Worth for the Junior Patriot, where the top prizes reached $40,000 for the winners.
Colton said he liked competing the Will Rogers Arena, although the buildings were spread out so much that he had to walk a lot for his events. He also noted that the dirt had a different feel than in Ohio.
"Texas dirt, it's more sandy," he said. "And then down here, it's more like clay. and it's stickier. The first couple years, my horse kept on slipping, and then she got in her shoes, and she didn't slip this year, but they also had a lot more dirt."
Colton made three runs with Viv in the barrel races and three on Kate in pole bending, starting with the pole bending on March 5. He turned in a time of 21.57, finishing fifth.
That put him "in the crack", running too slow for the top spots but too fast to fall into the second section for another chance at prizes.
"We were at Garwood Arena and he was running in the national pole bending, red carpet run," Emily Hay recalled by way of explanation. "It paid out in divisions, like the first division, second division, third division, and he was 0.094 of a second away from $6,000. If he would have ran that much slower, he would have got $6,000, because he had been first in the second division.
But his time put him last in the first division, so he got nothing."
In barrel racing, he hit a barrel on his two fastest runs, so his best time came in the Open 5D division on March 8 with a 17.268, which earned him $531 in the sidepot.
Colton said that he felt his best runs were in pole bending, but he came away with better results in the barrels.
"He ran good poles," Emily Hay said, "but he was in the crack. So he had to go a little faster, a little bit slower to get money. But in the barrels, he actually brought home prize money."
Another Celina native, 16-year-old Natalie Rider, also went down to the Junior Patriot, competing in barrel racing with her horse Peppys Slick Chic and peaking with a time of 18.006 in the Open 5D on Friday.
In the next few months, Colton said he's trying to qualify for another national tournament, the Vegas Tuffest.
