Dances With Steers

Doing so in a sport called team roping has won him great memories and a large amount of prize money. On that particular day, though, something was off. An internet video shows Bret and his partner on their horses dashing behind a steer: 200 kilos, pitch black. Donning a cowboy hat and a red flannel shirt that blows in the wind, Bret races his horse out of an iron gate, chasing the steer. He is using a brand-new rope, one that slides through his fingers a tad too effortlessly.

A run of team roping normally lasts less than a minute. The challenge is for two riders to catch a steer with a rope and immobilize it as fast as possible. This time Bret is in charge. He has to catch the steer by its horns with a rope, which he wraps around his saddle horn, while his partner takes care of the steer’s hind legs. However, this time things don’t go as expected.

However, Bret insists that this is not his favorite aspect of roping. “I like the competition and the comradery best. Only if you get along well with your horse and trust your roping partner, you perform well as a team.” Teamwork is also important in his daily work as an SAP consultant for the Business Unit Americas of GF Piping Systems. When Bret is not hunting down steers in a sandy arena, he handles the automated order and invoicing system and, as he puts it, “anything going in and coming out of SAP.” Usually, Bret works at the office in Shawnee, OK (US), which is located about 40 kilometers southeast of his home. Since the COVID‑19 pandemic began in 2020, he’s mainly been working from home – and enjoying it. “I can work very efficiently, and it saves me 1.5 hours of commute on a daily basis.”

Bret enjoys the challenging nature of his work. “I like putting together various puzzle pieces and making things work.” This is clear when he explains how he programmed a software solution from scratch to reduce the time employees spend entering their data. Bret’s solution saves his colleagues significant amounts of time.

Bret grew up on a farm. He learnt at an early age from his father, who was a veterinarian, how to take care of horses and catch cattle with a rope. Even though roping had been a part of daily life during his childhood, Bret didn’t practice it competitively for roughly 25 years, because he was too busy making a living and taking care of his family. It is only now that just one of his children is still living at home that he can dedicate his free time to his horses, the practice, and the competitions – the “cowboy lifestyle,” as he calls it.

And a lifestyle it is. On a typical day, Bret will get up, take care of the three horses he owns with his wife Lynne, work eight hours, and again dedicate himself to the animals after work. On weeknights, he often takes part in local tournaments or meets with his roping partner to practice and improve their skills. Luckily, his wife is equally passionate about horses and joins him on his trips.

While roping and programming might at first sight seem worlds apart, they become more similar the more closely they are observed. Roping runs are often decided by split seconds. To perform in those decisive seconds, everything has to fit. “You need the skills, the right horse, and a great partner.”

Bret is sure that his career in IT complements his skills in roping very well. IT work trained his ability to consider all variables and to focus solely on the relevant ones when it matters most. This is a skill he has applied countless times to fix software issues at GF Piping Systems in Shawnee. There, a secure stock system keeps track of the contents of 21 cabinets where working materials for production employees are stored – security glasses, gloves, and drill bits. Employees scan their badges to open them and detail the products that they take out. This way, the system automatically knows what to reorder. It’s a practical solution for the employees – but also one that is prone to mistakes.

“When somebody doesn’t check items out properly or enters a zero for quantity in a hurry, it causes the system to fail and I have to fix it quickly to keep it going,” Bret explains. Since he knows the system inside out and learnt a lot from past incidents, it’s easy for him to track down the cause of the respective malfunction and get it up and running again.

2020 was a tough year for Bret when it came to roping. “I wasn’t winning much and it was getting really discouraging,” he remembers. So he did what he knows best. “I sat down with my wife and analyzed all variables. We even had a spreadsheet to track all kinds of variables, including our entry fees and winnings.” He laughs at the memory. Together they came up with a new strategy: Bret would compete in fewer competitions and pick only the big ones. And, most importantly, he prioritized teaming up with partners that he worked together with best. It worked. “Finally, this year, I have started to have more success.”

Looking back recently at the five years he has dedicated to team roping, Bret reflects, “The accomplishment I’m most proud of is fighting through the mental toughness of when you don’t do well.” Doing so would have been impossible without the support of his wife – and the closely knit community within the roping world. “They believe in me and we share experiences and lessons learnt – this keeps us going.”

This, without a doubt, is also true for Bret’s colleagues at GF. The good relationship with the worldwide team has already kept him on the job for the past ten years, and he is sure it will do so for another ten – at least.