Sarah Angelone’s 2023 gameplan did not include a trip to Las Vegas in December but after such a successful winter, she owed it to herself and her horse to hit the rodeo road.
A Summer Run hauling with her sister, World Champion Martha Angelone, was an adventure. Although they are not alike in a lot of ways they know how to push each other and when Sarah thought about heading home, Martha gave her no other choice but to stay on the trail.
“She was like ‘I’m going to enter you or you’re going to have to pay turnout fines, one or the other’ so I was like okay, I’ll just stay out here. It was cool to get to experience all that with her because she had already been and she was kind of the veteran where as I was kind of the rookie,” Sarah said.
The Virginia native found herself on the back of a horse for the first time after what she calls her father’s midlife crisis. Sarah grew up in a household where her parents trained hunting dogs and one day, they bought horses, built an arena and started finding clinics to learn how to ride.
“Rodeoing in Virginia is totally different than Texas or the West Coast. Not a lot of people know, when I went to public school they asked me if I rode bulls or barrel raced,” she said.
Opportunities to rope were few and far between in Virginia where as in Texas, Sarah drives a couple miles and can find a roping box.
Her unlikely rodeo upbringing in Virginia and some early bumps at the beginning of her ProRodeo career, made making it to the biggest stage in the sport that much better. Sarah said the feeling she had last season when she knew she made the National Finals Breakaway Roping was unlike any other.
“It was the best feeling ever. I’ve had to sit and watch for the past four years so to be able to compete this year was pretty cool.”
