WPRA NEWS

Boyett Has Bright Future in Tie-Down Roping, Wins First World Title

By Ted Harbin

Over her career, WPRA gold-card cowgirl Kari Nixon has proven her mettle. She’s a four-time tie-down roping world champion who was attempting a fifth in 2024.

An upstart pulled off the upset, though. Enter Kolby Boyett, a permit-holder from Grove, Oklahoma, who celebrated her 21^st birthday on Jan. 23, just a few weeks after claiming her first world title tying down calves. She finished the year with $2,206, just $487 ahead of Nixon and collected rodeo’s top honor.

“It was awesome and extremely exciting, because it wasn’t really something I was expecting,” said Boyett, who works full time for AST Storage, which is based in Jay, Oklahoma. “Since I wasn’t expecting it, I would call it shocking but still extremely awesome.”

Because of her job, roping takes a bit of a back seat for the northeastern Oklahoma cowgirl, but she’s participated in all the roping disciplines sometime during her career. She competes at some ProRodeos in breakaway roping and also tries her hand in team roping, but she got into tie-down roping as a youngster.

“I breakaway roped a lot when I was younger, but I guess I always wanted to tie calves,” she said. “My cousin actually started tying calves, when he was probably 10 or so. I just started tying calves with him.”

She’s stayed with it, but she likes the overall aspects of competition. She watched her father, who heeled, and she just started picking it up.

“When I was 3 years old, I’d sit out there on the arena fence and watch him and his buddies rope,” Boyett said. “He just started taking me along, and I just kind of started roping.”

The seed was planted, and over the course of her young life, Boyett has had a lot of folks step in and help along the way. She credits many of them with getting her to this stage of her career.

“I head quite a bit of steers,” she said. “That’s actually what I did more than anything else growing up. I started breakaway roping at the same time, then I started tying calves at home. I started tying more calves when I was probably 16 or 17, but I’ve really tied a lot more calves in the last two years.”

Like anyone in Western sports, Boyett understands the importance of horsepower. She works with them and trains them, but she also has had to make adjustments along the way.

“Last July, my good horse ruptured his deep flexor tendon,” Boyett said. “I took him to (Oklahoma State University), and they told me it was the worst they’d ever seen. They want to use him to teach students what it is; that’s how bad it is.

“So, I didn’t have my good horse. The horse I rode, I didn’t really ride her a whole lot the last three years, but I started riding her a lot more in August and September.”

That’s what she rode at the WPRA World Finals in November, and the title came her way. Now, she’ll go back to the drawing board. She’ll probably stay on her permit in 2025 and focus on the work at hand, whether it’s with her company or training a new set of mounts.

“I’m going to try to go to the ropings that I can go to,” she said. “I’m also going to try to get some colts and maybe do some futurities and some things like that.”

Even in her early 20s, Boyett understands that it will take work for the next big thing to happen.

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