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Helping the Horse
Barrel racer Dena Kirkpatrick earned her success by putting her horses’ needs first
by Diane Rice
Dena Kirkpatrick’s goal has always been to help the horse, regardless of its owner’s goals. “She puts the horse first and I think that’s really
important,” says Dena’s close friend Sherry Cervi, a four-time WPRA World Champion barrel racer and 2018 National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame inductee. “She understands horses; she’s been around them her whole life and she’s ridden all different sorts of pedigrees—race-bred and others.
“Her horsemanship and the way she can train a horse are unbelievable; I’ve ridden horses [she has trained] and they have such a good foundation,” Sherry adds. “She knows what each horse needs and she does what’s best for them.”
“When you start training for the public,” Dena says, “you ride anything that anybody gives you, but as I got more into [the business], I made sure that people knew I was going to train the horse at his pace of learning and not force in order to get to a specific futurity. If he couldn’t be ready, then I couldn’t do it. My goal was to help the horse, whether it went on to become an older lady’s horse or a kid’s horse or a 3D horse or even a 1D horse. My goal was for it to be the best it could be with what God gifted it with, and that somebody else could ride it when it was ready to leave my house.”
As a result, after more than three decades in the arena, Dena sits in the upper echelon of barrel horse trainers, having competed at hundreds of barrel racing futurities including Barrel Futurities of America, Old Fort Days Futurity and Pink and Ruby Buckle futurities. She has also competed for many years in the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association. She has trained nine horses who went on to compete at the NFR, including one World Champion, and the great Willy Nick Bar, on whom she won the 1997 World Barrel Racing Futurity Championship and who remains the BFA’s #2 all-time winningest horse*.
SPEEDHORSE
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