Wyatt Cox just finished 17th in the 2025 world heeling standings after starting the season with Marcus Theriot, and spending the second half battling behind Lightning Aguilera. The 30-year-old California native now lives in Morgan Mill, Texas, and is engaged to Teisha Coffield.
Q: What were your early days like growing up in Arroyo Grande, California?
A: The best of both worlds. We’ve got the beach, and we got to do a little cowboying. So I got to see both sides of it.
Q: When did you move to Texas, and why?
A: I moved to Texas the winter of my rookie year in 2015 to take rodeoing further and take roping more seriously. Where I live now is the proving ground, and I want to be the best I can be.
Q: Describe your roping style.
A: Aggressive. We like to press and push the envelope. My mom (Cindy; daddy Doug and little brother Cayden round out the Cox Fab Four) told me since I was in junior rodeo that it’s a timed event.
Q: How many years have you been on the full-time rodeo trail, and who’ve you roped with these last few years?
A: I’ve rodeoed hard since 2015. These last handful of years I’ve roped with Jaxson Tucker, Tanner James, Chad Masters, Marcus and Lightning.
Q: How big of a transition was it from heeling behind Chad in 2024 to Lightning in 2025?
A: It was very different. Lightning and I have done a lot of practicing trying to adjust, and we’ve made some horse changes. We’ve been working on discipline. I didn’t need that as much behind Chad. Now Lightning takes care of the going fast, and I just need to have the discipline to catch ’em all.
Q: What do you consider the highlight of your roping career?
A: Winning the BFI Reno Open in 2021 was probably the biggest win. It’s just a big jackpot, and jackpotting wasn’t my strong suit. I’m definitely better at one-headers. Winning a roping of that size proved to me that I’m not one-dimensional. It made me realize there are more possibilities.
Q: What else do you like to do these days besides rope?
A: Anything outdoors, mainly hunting and fishing. I like to get out and hunt anything, primarily deer in the recent past. And I take a spinning rod with me all summer, and fish all over Utah and Wyoming.
Q: Did finishing 17th and coming so close hurt or help your roping motivation?
A: It helped. I had plenty of motivation before, but I’m definitely using it as fuel. It hasn’t deterred me at all. We’re almost there.
Q: Who do you practice with?
A: Probably Clint Summers the most. And everyone, really. I usually go to Chad’s a lot in the wintertime.
Q: Who have been the most influential people in your roping career?
A: Chad’s been a big-time mentor. He never let me go home my rookie year, when I was roping with Doyle Hoskins. We hadn’t won much, and by about the Fourth (of July) I was getting broke. Chad told me, “If you go home now, you might as well stay home.”
Q: Got any heeling heroes?
A: Champ (Clay Cooper). He’s so versatile, he changed the game and he always adapted. He had a great catch style in the beginning, and toward the end was changing and competing at a high level against guys like Junior (Nogueira), who are completely different from when Clay and Jake (Barnes) were kicking butt.
Q: Who takes on which roles on your team?
A: Lightning does all the entering, and he’s the quarterback who sets the tone for how fast we’re going to go. I just pretty much react to what he does. Our plan is to go as fast as we can on the steer we draw. I press to get there, so I can throw fast, too. I know with some of the new 2026 teams—like Tyler Tryan and Levi Lord, Tanner Tomlinson and Coleby Payne, Shay Carroll and Denton Dunning, and Coleman Proctor and Travis Graves—both partners are going to press. That means we both need to stay aggressive, too.
Q: What’s your most important roping goal right now?
A: To make the National Finals. It’s what I’ve worked toward my whole career, and what I’ve been fighting for this whole time. Everybody wants to win world titles, but the first step is to make the National Finals. There’s no sign of slowing down anytime soon. We don’t have a backup plan.
Q: What have been the hardest lessons to learn out on the rodeo road?
A: Trying to learn how to catch the key cattle. They all matter, but there are key steers you need to catch. You’ve got to earn points in the (ProRodeo) Tour standings, so you can go to Puyallup (Washington) and Sioux Falls (South Dakota). I’ve missed those the last couple seasons, and didn’t have access to that kind of money at that time of the year. I was rodeoing for way less money than the guys who played the game and got there. At Sioux Falls, they were winning on one steer what I’d have had to win first at three rodeos to win.
Q: What do you love and hate most about rodeoing?
A: I love that it’s a self-driven sport. Nobody’s going to push you to do it, so you’re going to have to want to do it. I love being out there, but I hate that I had to leave my entire family in California to move to Texas to chase a dream. It’s taken 11 years so far, and I’m still knocking on the door. It’s quite an undertaking. But like they say, “That’s rodeo.”
Q: What excites you most about rolling into 2026?
A: Lightning and I are going back at ’em, and I’m looking forward to picking up where we left off. We had some good momentum going. We have one gear, and that’s 100 miles an hour. We’re going to go at ’em in the wintertime, then go see if we can catch more cattle when it goes outside. I’m excited to take off again, and see what we can win.
—TRJ—
