The night air was warm and muggy on July 5, 1976. There was barely any wind to move a single hair out of place—hers or her horse’s. Close to 34,000 people sat watching. It was her first time. She was excited and proud. She was also grateful for the gloves. Without them, the flagpole might have slipped through her grip, which was clammy, maybe from nerves.
Her equestrian drill team, the Texas Ranger Belles, had chosen her to post the American flag, which meant she was in the lead as the seven horses loped around Arlington Stadium, home of the Texas Rangers baseball team. She wouldn’t have dared to make a mistake, keeping the flag upright at all times, her forearm parallel to the ground and her elbow flexed at a right angle, with the flag’s bottom edge six inches above her head.
How perfect they looked in their shiny red cowboy hats, matching red boots, and dark blue uniforms stitched with stars and stripes. How perfectly they rode the perimeter of the stadium all the way to home plate, where she could see her four-year-old son waving from his seat along the first base line. And how perfectly timed that as the national anthem filled the air, her horse dumped a pile of manure right on home. The Texas Rangers defeated the Detroit Tigers that night, 8–6. I wasn’t born yet, but Dad told me later he thought Mom’s horse pooping had been a good omen.
I never learned to ride, not like my mom did. She dragged me to dude ranches and rodeos and made me dress up in cowgirl attire, but I never caught the horse fever, and I’m not sure I understood in full—at least while she was alive—the intensity of hers.
Two winters ago, while getting an early jump on spring cleaning, I went rummaging through a box of family mementos and found a picture of my mom with the Texas Ranger Belles. I’d seen it before, but with the glazed, indifferent eyes of a teenager. I don’t remember talking to her about her drill team. I didn’t even know equestrian drill was a thing. But here was this image of women racing around a ballpark in a beautiful fury of speed and skill, tugging me toward the past, into a subculture my mom knew so well and of which I knew so little.
Equestrian drill is a thrilling sport to watch. Riders, up to sixteen at a time, execute choreographed maneuvers around an arena, often half the size of a football field. There is no room for error. In one maneuver called the “suicide charge,” two rows of riders race toward each other—typically without helmets—their horses’ hooves pounding the dirt as one row passes through another, just inches apart. If the team adds a maneuver known as “lace the boot,” two single file lines of riders lope in the same direction and then weave through each other as they make their way up the centerline of the arena. In another maneuver, the “egg beater,” riders in different circles will revolve in the same direction and then interlock.
Jill Kraut, who chairs the equestrian drill program for the California State Horsemen’s Association, told me that the sport’s roots can be traced to the battlefield, when cavalries used specific maneuvers to position troops. “At the end of World War II, the soldiers came home and family-oriented equestrian clubs became popular,” leading to the formation of drill teams performing cavalry maneuvers. By the 1970s, women dominated the sport, pulling ideas for choreography not only from the military but also from about anywhere they could find them.
In Texas, many women like my mom started down the path to drill at saddle clubs, where they tested their speed and skill in events like barrel racing and pole bending. They would race against the clock to navigate their horses around barrels or poles without touching them.
“We got hurt all the time,” Jenny Nunn told me. She was fourteen when she joined the Texas Ranger Belles, which formed in 1971 in the suburban stretch between Dallas and Fort Worth. “The play days would start early in the morning and go all night long. Once, I got home at, like, 4 a.m.”
Nunn is now 68 years old and competes in agility shows with her border collie. She told me she didn’t think my mom had ridden with the Belles for very long. “I don’t remember her, but I would probably remember her horse.”
Nunn said the team was large, with more than thirty riders, and it included some mother-daughter pairs. Most of the women trained their own horses. “We had several uniforms throughout the years, and I remember the angst my mother had trying to sew each new uniform,” she recalled. “If we didn’t have long hair, we’d have to wear a wig during our performances. That was my biggest fear—that my wig was going to fly right off with my hat.”
The Belles entered their first public competition in 1972 at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show, the nation’s oldest continuously running livestock show and rodeo. They won first place out of 96 other riding groups. Over the next decade, the group would go on to win more than one hundred trophies and an invitation to the 1981 Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California.
“We sold hundreds of the World’s Finest Chocolate bars to pay for our trip to Pasadena,” said Gail Taylor, one of the earliest members of the team. “We made enough money to take our husbands along with our horses.” At 85, Taylor still recalls many details from those years, including one story of my mom. “Roberta had a big pear tree in her front yard and told us we could have all the pears we wanted. So, we’d ride over to her house and let our horses eat those pears.”
My mom left the team long before they rode to the Rose Bowl, but the Belles continued on through the 1980s before disbanding for good.
“Some of my best years,” Taylor said. “I loved it. We all did.”
When my mom rode in the 1970s, equestrian drill was more performative—posting colors at parades or serving as the opening act at rodeos—than competitive. That would all change in 1980, when four drill teams from the Pacific Northwest formed the Washington Ladies Riding Club Association (WLRCA), the first in the U.S. to train drill judges and encourage more rigor and uniformity. This led to more formal competitions and helped take the sport from simple follow-the-leader drills to more complicated maneuvers with different riders shifting into and out of leader positions, the same way flocks of birds constantly change leaders in a V formation.
Diane Thomas was a part of this early vanguard and served on the WLRCA board for almost forty years. Now 85, Thomas no longer competes, but she still coaches a team in Spanaway, Washington, just south of Tacoma, and she travels around the country to judge competitions. To some, she’s the “grandmother of drill.” To me, she’s a version of my mom I sometimes imagine—not undone by age, if maybe slowed down by it, and still doing what she loves.
I asked her how hard it would be for a novice like me to take up the sport. “Anyone can learn to ride drill, but many people get on a horse and they’re scared spitless,” Thomas said. “It takes them a lot of time to get over that.” She also said the quality of drill right now is off the charts.
Take a maneuver like “the sweeps.” The horses move fast around an arena—by fast, a loping horse can top seventeen miles per hour—while maintaining close proximity to one another, as close as eight inches. The coordination matters, too. The lead rider speeds up once she turns the corner of the arena so that the rider in the last position doesn’t have to slow down. This adjustment, known as “rating,” is essential for executing the choregraphed move. “It’s all geography,” Thomas said.
Then there’s the “double herringbone,” one of the most difficult maneuvers in drill. Two lines of riders lope at a 45-degree angle through duplicate lines of riders coming from the opposite direction. “If one person’s timing is off, you could crash,” said Christy Slaby, captain of Latigo ‘N Lace, an award-winning team from Washington state.
Many of the women who ride have full-time jobs; they’re nurses and teachers, flight attendants and small business owners. They participate in the sport because they love it. They practice year-round, travel for days at a time during competition season, and pay out-of-pocket for lodging, gas, food, and stall fees. If they’re good enough, they earn a little bit of prize money to cover costs. Mostly, they rely on local fundraising efforts to support their efforts. They do it because they can’t imagine not doing it.
“The love of horses is like nothing else,” Slaby said. “And when you share that in common with a group of women that are supportive and there to grow with you, it’s a really safe, inspiring environment to be in and it’s a ton of fun.”
It’s hard to know exactly how many drill teams exist in the United States. Groups form and then disband, and some never get the chance to compete. Heidi Hampton Young, a drill coach in Idaho, maintains a directory of teams and counts 290 active troupes, including 40 from Texas, the most of any state, with names like Cowgirl Congress, Red Dirt Riders, and Texas Tornadoes. April Evans coaches an award-winning team that’s based north of Plano, Texas, called the Woodhaven Wranglers. She distinguishes Texas drill from West Coast drill by referring to the former as “yeehaw drill,” which is more fast-paced with less precision choreography. For her team, she combines the best of both styles.
Certain teams ride sidesaddle like the escaramuza charras—female equestrians who perform in Mexican rodeos—while others ride in darkened arenas, horse and rider lit up like Christmas trees. Many of the competitions happen in Texas and the western United States, but teams are also active in Georgia and Florida and almost anywhere you can find a rodeo.
In Bulverde, a small town in the Hill Country north of San Antonio, pick any Saturday night from March through November, and you’ll find a drill team named the Rough Riders performing at the Tejas Rodeo. “It feels like you’re taking a step back in time,” Roxy Vasquez, cocaptain of the Rough Riders, told me. “You can get real close and personal with the rodeo. There’s chairs right next to the rails of the arena, and you can get dirt up in your face as the horses run by.”
Vasquez, who was born and raised in Illinois before moving to the San Antonio area, didn’t start riding horses until she was forty, after her daughter, Jasmine Vasquez, began taking lessons. Today, mother and daughter serve as cocaptains of the Rough Riders, their long brown hair and welcoming smiles a weekend fixture at the rodeo. “We’re a little bit unique,” Roxy Vasquez said. “I don’t know of another drill team in Texas that performs as often as we do.”
This past April, the day before the total solar eclipse, organizers in Bulverde hosted a special Sunday rodeo. In a covered open-air arena, with the temperature hovering around eighty degrees, the crowd cheered as the announcer introduced the Rough Riders. They wore button-down shirts patterned with the Texas flag, red bandannas around their necks and white chaps fringed red and blue. The horses shifted from hoof to hoof, tails swishing, as they waited for the gate to swing open.
“It’s the most exciting thing,” Glenn Rust told me. “You need it to keep your blood flowing.” Rust, who is 81, helps the team with everything from opening the gate to passing out water. His fifteen-year-old granddaughter also rides with the team. As Rust opened the large metal gate, the arena sound system blasted Gretchen Wilson’s country song “Here for the Party.” The team rode out single file into the recently dragged dirt, scattering the scent of loam, clay, and sand into the air. Jasmine Vasquez took the lead, carrying the American flag.
Mandy Claver, who sits on the board of the Equestrian Drill Teams of Texas, explained to me just how difficult it is to ride with flags. “The American flag needs to stay ahead of or to the right of all the other flags in the formation,” she said. The more intricate the maneuvers, the more difficult it is to follow flag protocol.
For the Rough Riders, the team’s precision is all the more surprising when you consider that Roxy Vasquez’s horse, Misty, is blind. The bay-colored quarter horse started losing her eyesight almost a decade ago but still performs with little difficulty, especially in her home arena. “Horses learn the patterns quickly, probably faster than we do as riders,” Vasquez told me—a point I heard from many riders, often punctuated with stories of horses finishing routines even after their riders had fallen off.
After the opening routine, the Rough Riders assembled in the center of the arena for the national anthem. Normally, at this point, Roxy Vasquez and her horse would step forward for a solo ride, making the customary two laps before returning to center. But this was not a normal day. That morning, she had been performing at a private event and riding a different horse when the horse she was riding—not Misty, but her mustang, Matilda—got spooked. “Matilda’s probably only done five, maybe six rodeos,” Vasquez told me. “She was green when I bought her so it was quite a big thing for her to do this.” For that performance, Vasquez had decided to carry a special flag she and her daughter had won at a competition last year.
“It’s kind of crinkly like a dog toy.” The mustang knew what to expect with the team’s regular flags, but not this one. When the horse heard the crinkle, she bolted, trying to escape from the noise. Vasquez, caught off guard, fell out of her saddle and landed hard in the dirt. Even though she was hurting, she told the EMTs when they came over to examine her, “I’m good, I’m good.” She insisted on finishing the routine on a different horse. It was only when she was done, after the adrenaline had worn off, that she was pretty sure she had broken some ribs. And she had, at least two.
The accident kept her from performing later that night at the pre-eclipse rodeo. She took the next month off to recover. In May, when she returned to the arena, Vasquez resumed her solo ride during the national anthem, which she always ended by filling the empty space next to her daughter. “It’s such a blessing to be able to share that experience with her,” Roxy Vasquez told me. “To get to see her shine with all her strength.”
She said she was right where she was supposed to be. The crowd whistled and hollered as they loped out of the arena.
I wish I had seen my mom pound the dirt with the Texas Ranger Belles. I wish I had seen her speed past in a blur of colors before passing through another line of riders, clean and fast. I did see her race a horse once, though. We were in Durango, Colorado, and I watched her compete in a barrel race and win. She radiated confidence as she made the cloverleaf laps, careful not to touch a barrel and lose points off her time. She was an object in motion, never not in motion.
