Riding a 15-year-old former pack horse, Paisley Grant put together a clean, smooth run at just the right moment to finish in first place Dec. 14 in a national barrel-racing competition in Las Vegas.
Paisley pulled off the impressive performance at the Junior World Finals on her horse, Tanner.
“It was a really crazy experience,” said Paisley, who turned 16 this month. “This year was really a comeback and it was really nice.”
Paisley referred to the accomplishment as a comeback because two years earlier when she competed in the Junior World Finals, she had qualified for the short go — the terminology used for the final round when the top competitors square off for the highest places — but didn’t fare so well.
Dani Grant, Paisley’s mother who also competes and trains, called it a great performance.
“You need tight turns but also they have to have good execution out of them,” she said. “You don’t want to be too straight, you don’t want to be too round. It’s really hard … the timing and the queuing is the key to quick runs. She rode him perfectly.”
In the final run, Paisley and Tanner finished the pattern in 13.830 seconds to win not only the senior division but all-around honors for top average time.
Paisley is the daughter of Shane and Dani Grant and granddaughter of Sterling and Terrie Grant, and Jim and Candy Hlavinka — and there are strong Philomath connections. Sterling and Shane Grant are owners of Out West Farm & Ranch Store. The Hlavinkas live a few miles south of town on a rural property east of Fern Road.
Paisley at one point in the past attended classes in Philomath and is now educated through an online school and currently in her sophomore year. She lives with her family on property near Harlan.
Dani is herself into barrel racing and so it was natural for Paisley to pick it up. In fact, she can’t even remember the first time she participated in an event — she was in a division for toddlers ages 1-1/2 to 2 (the kids are led through the course on little ponies).
Qualifying to get to the Junior World Finals is a story in itself. Paisley had failed to earn an automatic berth by not finishing in the top two at various qualifier races. However, she had a handful of third- and fourth-place finishes to accumulate enough points to be included in the top-10 standings. As her mother pointed out, Paisley “barely squeaked in” on points.”
“We’ve told her, ‘don’t think about whether you have to be first or second — just make points. We’ll go to however many (competitions) we need to just to make points and don’t worry about being the best,’’’ Dani said she told Paisley. “So she snuck in there on points and then all of these top girls that won in races in Texas and Oklahoma and all these big barrel-racing and rodeo states — she beat them out.”
Paisley finished second in the first round with a time of 13.990 seconds and was ninth in the second round with a 14.024 before moving on to the short go. At that point, she was leading the senior division (ages 13 and older) but there were two riders from the junior division (ages 12 and under) that had equal or slightly better averages in the chase for the best all-around average.
“On the third run, the other ones didn’t perform as good as her so that put her average above everybody else,” Dani explained. “So she was the fastest out of everybody.”
Paisley admitted that she gets “super nervous” when getting ready to race and just hopes that her horse doesn’t do anything dumb during the competition. After the final run in Vegas, she said she was speechless.
“I was just so happy that we did good all three runs because we’d never really made three good runs in a row,” she said.
Paisley won several prizes for the performance — $11,100 in cash, a top-rated horse trailer, new barrel saddle, custom vintage Louis Vuitton purse, blanket magnet therapy system, stall mat, stall gate and various other items, including the championship buckle, of course.
Paisley has competed with Tanner for the past four years or so.
“He actually was originally my dad’s pack horse when he was younger,” Paisley said, “and then my dad didn’t go hunting one year so my mom started him on barrels. So he doesn’t go into the mountains anymore and he’s a full-time barrel horse now.”
Tanner worked as a trail and pack horse until he was 7 or 8 years old. Dani further explained how the transition to barrel racer occurred.
“I don’t know what happened — he had to cancel his hunting trip and I was like, ‘well, I just spent months getting this horse in shape to ride in the mountains and I’m not going to waste that,’” Dani said, adding that she decided they would ride him over the winter and start taking him to races.
“It was a lot of work and I mean, he wasn’t a top barrel horse right away — it took probably eight months and then he was doing pretty good,” Dani said, who followed up with examples of how there were plenty of ups and downs through the training process. “It’s like a roller coaster until they get really seasoned. Paisley started riding him once I’d rode him probably for a year and a half, close to two years on barrels.”
Tanner’s bloodline is as a cutting, reining-type horse — not barrel racing. He started a little later than most other horses at competing but Dani said he’s in his prime.
“Technically, he hasn’t really had his legs ran off — as people call it,” she said. “It’s just like any athlete … There’s still a lot of maintenance and everything for what it takes to be an athlete and I mean, pro football players don’t last forever. It’s the same thing with these guys.”
Tanner, whose registered name is Sonny At Five, was bred and raised at Airlie Farms, a quarter horse breeder near Monmouth owned by Nancy Petterson.
Asked why she loves barrel racing so much, Paisley said, “Just being with my horse, just running with him is fun.”
Paisley said she now has her sights set on returning to Vegas in 2025.