Summer Kosel and FireWaterFrenchFame won the Ellensburg Rodeo average for the second year in a row Monday night, running 54.01 seconds on three head to take $7,980 out of a $40,000 barrel racing purse in Ellensburg, Washington.
Kosel and the 12-year-old gelding she calls Apollo were the only pair in the field to place in every round. The first one went in dry slack. Then it started raining and it did not stop through the Sept. 7 finals.
Rain is not what Ellensburg is known for in September, and Kosel said she had never run there in it.
“It actually started raining the first perf that they had and then it rained all the way through,” she said. “It’s usually like 105 and dry there.”
Ellensburg put in new ground for 2026 and Kosel said it held all the way through, deep and wet as it got. Apollo had an answer for it, and she traces that to where he was raised. Her family ranches along the Missouri River outside Glenham, South Dakota, and she seasoned him gathering pastures.
I think he would run through hell and high water for me, honestly.
Summer Kosel
“When I was seasoning him, I would use him for my horse to go to the pasture to gather, so he’s been through the river and all of that stuff,” Kosel said. “He’s really surefooted. We’ve ran flat over prairie dog towns gathering cattle and he never takes a misstep.”
“A lot of times Apollo will bury his butt and keep pulling with his front legs and keep his hind legs under him if it’s dry ground,” she said, describing what mud changes. “And when he runs in stuff like that, he stays more four-wheel drive, to where he’ll pick up all four feet to go around.”
Kosel tied for seventh in the first round at 17.33 for $737 and was seventh in the semifinals at 18.43 for $884. Monday she was second in the short round at 18.25 for $1,719, behind Kathy Grimes’ 18.01, and won the average at 54.01 for $4,640, six-hundredths clear of the field. Grimes and Heidi Gunderson tied for second in the average at 54.07 for $3,646 each, Lisa Lockhart was fourth at 54.13 for $2,873 and Kim Squires was fifth at 54.24 for $2,210.
Before the short round Kosel called home and asked her husband, Kevin, whether to run Apollo or get on something else.
“He just said, ‘He’s prepared. You’re fine. Just send him,’” she said. “And so it’s kind of one of those things of I kind of did it for him in a sense, and then you just got to trust that God’s going to make it work or not make it work and you have to be at peace with that decision.”
It nearly came undone at the first. “He nose-dived on me a second and I picked him up because I knew that he had kept his feet under him,” Kosel said. “And then when he came around the backside, it was like it almost made him angry and tried harder, because when I leaned forward to push to third, he caught more gears. And then at third he just whipped it and ran home hard, probably as hard as if it were dry ground.”
“I think he would run through hell and high water for me, honestly,” she said. “He’s just cool.”
The calm walking in is an act. “Everybody sees him walking and he’ll just kind of lollygag walk and look around and see how many people are watching him,” Kosel said. “But in the back, he is not that nice and calm. He is a tornado. It’s like an impatient child wanting to go play a game that you’re not letting him go do.”
Kosel bought Apollo, by Aint Seen Nothin Yet and out of Fire Water Flyer by Fire Water Flit, at six, 45 days after he went on the barrel pattern, and got to watch his first run. His first rodeo came in June of his 7-year-old year, and by his fifth or sixth he had broken the Cheyenne Frontier Days arena record at 17.02. He went back the next year and turned in the first sub-17-second run recorded there, 16.97, beating his own mark. He was the 2023 WPRA Rising Star and made the NFR that season.
The $7,980 was the biggest piece of an $11,305 week, third-most of any barrel racer, and it carried Kosel from No. 19 to No. 17 in the world standings at $92,684. Austyn Tobey is No. 16 at $96,784, $4,100 up the road. The last NFR spot belongs to Katelyn Scott at $108,112, $15,428 ahead of Kosel.
Kosel qualified 17th in Cinch Playoff Series points for the 24-rider Puyallup field, which runs Thursday through Sunday at the Washington State Fair, and she is entered at Mandan after that. In 2025 a Puyallup round win paid $3,510 and the finals paid $13,400 to win. Four riders come out of Puyallup for the Governor’s Cup in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Sept. 25-27, where the 2025 champion took $30,000.
“My game plan is try to capitalize at Puyallup to make it count and get into Sioux Falls, because I think that’s going to be really good for him,” Kosel said. She stayed home through the spring and skipped the California run. “I was a little bit behind coming out here, and then had some mental struggles when I first got out here, and now we’re kind of back in the right mindset and back to just trying to make them count.”
Her daughters are home in South Dakota with Kevin, where they just worked all the calves.
“My husband and my kids have a game plan,” Kosel said. “Theirs is have mom go make the NFR, because we all want to go to the NFR. And like I said, I wouldn’t be out here if it weren’t for them. That’s my husband’s one request this year.”
One more thing about Monday. Ellensburg’s finals take a while and Kosel still had not picked out what she was wearing. She had just finished telling a breakaway roper that she is not superstitious. Then she opened her trailer closet and found the Ranch Dress’n shirt and the jeans she wore at the Dodge City Roundup finals the night she tipped a barrel with the win on the line.
“It’s literally my favorite color shirt that Fallon sent to me,” Kosel said. “That’s the only time I’ve ever worn it, with Dodge City finals, and I’ve literally made the same run I have won 500 rodeos on and somehow caught the second barrel, and I have not worn it since.”
She put it on, along with the same hat and the same boots on her horse.
“I was like, I’ll show you what luck is,” Kosel said. “Luck doesn’t mean anything. There’s no superstitions, no bad luck, no good luck. I’m going to go win this sucker in the same outfit I lost the other one in.”
And she did.