Tricia Aldridge will step into the Thomas and Mack Center for the first time in 2025 ranked No. 11 in the WPRA world standings after earning $141,182 across 87 rodeos.
The Sanger, Texas, trainer reached her first NFR on the back of her 5-year-old stallion Adios Pantalones, finishing one of the most unconventional and self-made rookie campaigns in recent history.
Aldridge wasn’t raised in a rodeo family. She didn’t come from a barrel racing program, didn’t grow up hauling, and had no blueprint laid out in front of her. What she did have, from childhood on, was an unshakable pull toward horses. “I was the kid begging for a pony,” she said. “Nobody in my family rode. We didn’t have money. But if someone had a horse, I wanted to be on it.”
She learned by watching. She learned by trial and error. She took lessons wherever she could find them, starting with local playdays before spending time riding under reining and cutting horse trainers. “The lady I took lessons from did reining horses, so that’s where I learned body control,” she said. “I learned how to move one around, how to get one soft and thinking. That’s still the foundation of everything I do today.”
Without the means to buy expensive, made horses, Aldridge began purchasing weanlings and training them herself. “When you’re poor, you hedge your bets,” she said. “I couldn’t afford made horses, but I could afford babies. I bought a lot of them. And I messed up a lot of them. That’s how you learn. You learn what never to do again.”
Over time she brought along a handful of horses that helped shape her horsemanship: Susie Has A Penny, Vibrant Rose, Sinaloa Stinson and Three Times The Fury, “Sway.” Sway was one of the first that put Aldridge in the limelight, earning over $230,000 her futurity season alone.
“Sway was the horse that believed in me before I believed in myself,” she said. “She carried me through a lot of the moments where I wasn’t sure if I was good enough.”
Furytyme is another on the list of Aldridge-trained standouts. “Puma,” is now on Fallon Taylor’s trailer and a consistent ProRodeo earner.
Aldridge trained horses while working full-time in construction engineering. Rodeo was not part of her lifestyle. “I’d honestly be surprised if I had entered ten rodeos in my life before this year,” she said. When she finally committed to a season, she didn’t quit her job— in her words, “I just stopped going.”
Her original goal was modest: break into the Top 30 and learn the system. “I gave myself two years,” she said. “My whole plan was to make mistakes the first year, learn the ropes, and maybe have a real shot the second year.”
Her year did not follow that plan.
Along Came Adios
The difference was a stallion she raised, trained and believed in long before the rest of the industry knew his name.
Adios Pantalones, a 2020 stallion by Tres Seis and out of French Bar Belle, was a weanling when Aldridge bought him. She documented his training publicly from the beginning. “I recorded everything,” she said. “Every single thing I did with him. I wanted transparency. I wanted to show that you don’t have to hide the process.”
He was talented, and showed it early. He broke out his futurity season breaking record after record, eventually becoming the all-time leading futurity horse, then the all-time industry leading stallion. Still, she wasn’t sure how he would respond to the rodeo environment in the long run.
Her first few rodeos with him in late 2024 showed her enough. “He just always shows up,” she said of the then 4-year-old. “Nothing scares him. Nothing rattles him.”
Aldridge took off early in the season, cracking into the top 15 early and solidifying her place at a few major invitational rodeos. She stayed inside the cut line for the entirety of the 2025 regular season.
Her season carried them west, where they found massive success in California. He won four out of six rodeos and placed at all six he competed at. Then he returned home and broke his nose in a turn-out in a random accident. He stayed home to rehab for a bit before the summer run, then picked back up full steam ahead.
With vets helping her manage the swelling and airflow issues, she kept him feeling confident and comfortable while continuing to enter strategically after he had some healing time. That strategy became essential as she navigated the ProRodeo road for the first time. She credits World Champion barrel racer Fallon Taylor for helping her learn which setups were appropriate for a 5-year-old stallion. “Fallon told me where not to go, and that helped me so much,” she said. “I had no experience with rodeo. I didn’t know any of the ins and outs.”
Aldridge is direct about being an overthinker. “If I had a bad run, I’d give myself eight hours — usually the drive to the next rodeo — to think about it,” she said. “Then I had to get out of my feelings and go on to the next one.”
What she didn’t have was outside financial support. She wants that known clearly, to serve as an inspiration to others with big dreams. “I did it all myself,” she said. “I didn’t have anyone funding this. No sponsors. No financial backers. It was all me. I want people to know you can get here that way.”
Her approach to entering was conservative and targeted. She chose rodeos based on setups she believed would fit Adios, hauling when she could, resting him when she needed to and accepting that her experience gap meant she would make mistakes. But the mistakes never derailed the season — the horse kept bringing her back into the standings.
By late summer, she realized an NFR qualification was no longer hypothetical. It was becoming likely. She kept her circle small, her schedule simple and her focus on keeping Adios mentally fresh. “I never wanted him to feel like this was pressure,” she said. “He’s just a baby. He’s five. I wanted it to feel like just another run, every time.”
By the end of the regular season, she had entered 87 rodeos and earned $141,182 — enough to secure the No. 11 position in the world and her first trip to Las Vegas.
“Anyone can do this,” she said. “You don’t have to come from rodeo. You don’t have to have money. You just have to believe in it, speak it and work for it. That’s the truth.”
Her story — entirely self-made, entirely self-funded and built on a stallion she raised from a baby — stands out not for its glamour but for its grit. There is no shortcut in her timeline, no advantage, no inherited program, no financial backing. Just a woman who loved horses enough to build her own future from the ground up, one weanling at a time.
“I’ve waited my whole life to get here. But I worked for it. And he worked for it. And we did it.”
Tricia Aldridge
Aldrdige plans to take Adios, and up-and-coming stallion, 4-year-old Truly Epic to NFR 2025. Stay tuned for all things NFR from BarrelRacing.com.