Catch the Legs with A Rodeo Loop

Video Transcript

"This is Randall Powell with Expert Village and in this clip I am going to show you how to throw a heel loop while team roping. Your heel loop is going to be bigger than your head loop so you get a pretty good loop built up. The whole principal behind heeling is placing a trap in front of the steers back 2 feet. You do this, you can get in time with the steer running down the pen watching his back feet running down the pen as you are riding your horse and swinging your rope and get everything in timing with that. Then after your header turns him and ropes him and turns him, you get your heel to fall in behind him there and you want to be just off to the left of the steer and just kind of almost parallel with your horses shoulder and the steers back legs, maybe a foot or two back from that. You just get in time and when the steers feet goes back, that is when you deliver your rope. When swinging a heel loop, you have more of an angle like a 35 degree angle over the left side of your shoulder here and how you judge that running down the pen, you just swing at an angle over your horse's left ear. Upon delivery whatever your header ropes the steer and takes him around the corner, you ride up there and as soon as your horse gets in position to deliver your loop, you come from out and across and not forward. Never throw your loop forward like you would a head loop. When you are delivering a heel loop, it is more just straight across and this angle, right here is what is going to push your tip through. The tip is this point of the rope that is always going to lead through or get to the target first. This is directly in front of the eye of the rope which is this part here. So you send your tip through, hang on to your rope a little longer than you would expect and deliver. Once you get your rope under there, you will see that the steers back 2 feet hopefully jump in it. That is when you would pull your slack and dally and that would stop your time and that's how you throw and deliver a heel loop. "