ArizonaRealCountry.com 15 September 2017 10712 W. Bell Rd. Sun City, AZ 85351 (in Bell Camino Center) 623-933-0034 ConsigningWomenAZ.com Clothing from the Golf Course to the Dance Floor and a Little Bit of Cowgirl in Between! Bring in This Ad for $5.00 OFF Your $30.00 Purchase! 3 or 4 second range. He will take a good shot and not choke. If you can’t handle a ton of pressure you might not want to be a heeler. Like getting started as a header, a heeler should get a rope and a dummy. I start my heelers out with a med soft heel rope ($40). This will help your shoulder get started and it will teach you to keep your swing and throw a more open loop. I as well as many professional heelers rope the dummy, lead steer and practice with a MS or softer rope for those same reasons. Your next purchase is a wooden saw horse ($10). Later you can get an expensive mechanical dummy like a Heel O’Matic or Smarty if you like, but you should first see if your shoulder and arm can handle a stiffer rope and heeling. Now comes one of the biggest controversial teaching methods of heeling – should your saw horse have the back legs up or on the ground? Many NFR team ropers teach one way or the other. I will tell you why each way is taught and tell you what I prefer. All four legs on the ground: The reason heelers teach this method is to teach you to throw a TRAP! You cannot scoop the feet out of the air if the saw horse is on the ground. A trap loop is the most used loop for NFR heelers. It works on the most different kinds of handles, draggers, trotters and hard ground. If you look at heeling pictures in “Spin to Win” magazine you will see almost every loop is a trap. The other loop that is used among NFR heelers is not called a “scoop” loop but is called “pulling your tip through” loop. The reason it is called this is they are throwing a trap but are keeping the tip moving and it will lock on the feet and have curl. Even guys that throw traps will do this on high-hopping cattle or if they have to speed up their throw to get in time. Both loops are used by everyone but most use one a lot more than the other. Depending on how that heeler ropes will determine how he teaches. Trap throwers will leave a saw horse on the ground more. Heelers that pull their tip through will teach students to rope a saw horse off the ground most of the time. I pull my tip through when I heel. I tried extremely hard to be a trap thrower, but I had trouble sorting my throw and would just catch right legs. I heard an interesting story told by a world champion heeler about a one-time NFR heeler that made the NFR pulling his tip through but got so obsessed with being a trapper that he ruined his career and never made the NFR again. I believe that most smaller NFR heelers pull their tip through and stronger NFR heelers with more power throw traps. The reason for this is that they are bigger and stronger and don’t need to pull their tip through, they can throw a hard stiff trap. Guys like me need that extra whip on their throw to get that loop to finish. This is not always true but it seems to add up most of the time. I teach students to rope with the saw horse off the ground. But I put the front feet off the ground higher than the back feet. This puts the back feet in the same angle and position as a steer’s feet would be if they were at the highest point of his jump. This feels the most realistic to me when I throw a heel loop. I also teach my students to pay attention to where their bottom strand is. If it is too far behind the feet then they would miss by kicking the bottom strand up – if they were out of time, steer trotted or dragged. The only ways that loop works is if you are perfectly in time. I teach to have the bottom strand of a finished heel loop 1-5 inches in front of the feet. The reason that I have the feet off the ground is so that you know exactly where your bottom strand is at when the loop finishes. You can swat a dummy on the ground and have a good looking loop that will rarely work on real steers. Reprinted from Facebook. Active Interest Media (AIM), who owns the World Series of Team Roping (WSTR), recently announced their acquisition of the United States Team Roping Championships (USTRC). Through this acquisition Ty Yost, founder of the National Team Roping Tour (NTR), has been named President-elect of the WSTR and will serve as a liaison during the impending transition. The NTR, however, is not a part of the acquisition and will continue as an independent membership organization. The current event schedule will remain as set and the 2018 NTR National Finals IV will take place March 5-10, 2018, at Rancho Rio in Wickenburg, Arizona. This new partnership between AIM, WSTR, and the USTRC will also allow the TRIAD to separate from every membership organization and run as an independent and transparent handicap organization. They strongly trust this to be a benefit to the industry and the NTR will continue to use the TRIAD numbering system. Nationalteamroping.com/events CHANGES IN THE ROPING INDUSTRY