Dear Roper,

This issue is produced in May—a month here in Texas filled with jackpots, but it’s also filled with lots of time at home in the practice pen for the best in the world before they leave for summer.

I live in Weatherford, just 15 minutes from Junior Nogueira. One of my favorite places on Earth is sitting in the dirt at his house, without much cell phone service, snapping photos and shooting videos of his horses and his family. So May is the perfect chance for us to catch up, let our kids play in the mud while we make content for us to use on his socials and in this magazine. It’s when he and I argue about what makes a great angle on a video or a photo, and we debate what sort of videos people want to see of his heel shots on TikTok.

A lot of this issue is a result of those long days. The cover is his 4-year-old Slick By Design x Apache R Hali stud, in a photo I snapped when he didn’t quite understand why I was sitting up by the boxes instead of out in the arena. (But when I sent him the image that resulted, he couldn’t argue anymore.) And the Practice Pen article is filled with shots of his paternal sibling to Apache R Hali—Apache R Zippy—that I took from the return alley dodging fire ants.

This is one of those issues we produced with passion—like always, but this one in particular. Calli Montague’s feature covers how some top-tier dads work with their own kids in the practice pen, and Julie Mankin covers the golden age of the all-girl ropings, a subject near and dear to her heart as a longtime storyteller of the ladies of the game.

I hope you all enjoy this like we did putting it together, and we’ll see you in Cheyenne.

Chelsea