story by Ruth Nicolaus
Brooke Forre is all business, whether she’s in school, helping her dad around their farm and ranch, or in the rodeo arena.
The Newman Grove, Neb. cowgirl, a member of the Nebraska Junior High School Rodeo Association, competes in the breakaway roping, goat tying, and team roping, heading for her sister, Allyx.
For the breakaway and goats, she rides a red dun named Newt, who is her favorite horse because of his versatility. “I can do about anything on him,” she said. He’s usually happy, she said, unless someone tries to touch his face. Her dad team ropes off him sometimes.
For the team roping, she rides Chief, a big palomino paint horse, “who is always happy and wants to go riding,” she reported.
Brooke is an eighth grade student at Newman Public School, where she loves her agriculture class. So far this year, they’ve done livestock judging and identifying different breeds of cattle, swine, ducks, goats, sheep, horses and some chickens. As a member of FFA, she’s been working on memorizing the FFA creed. Eighth graders won’t compete in the creed contest this year, but she’ll have a jump on next year’s contest.
She also loves math class. “I like numbers,” she explained, and she’s so good at math that the other kids rely on her to help them when they don’t understand it.
She rarely has school work to take home, because of her no-nonsense attitude. She gets her work done in class: “I don’t mess around and talk.”
Brooke is on her school’s 4.0 Honor Roll, even though she does not like reading class. “I dread reading,” she said.
Around the Forre place, she helps her dad put up electric fence for cows on stalks, drives the grain cart in the harvest field, does chores, and loves to take on any job that involves a vehicle. “She likes to drive,” her dad, Dusty, said. “Any job you can put her behind the wheel to do, she enjoys.”
The best meal her mom makes is homemade cheeseburger pizza, followed by her mom’s homemade chocolate angel food dessert: angel food cake, torn in pieces and layered with chocolate ice cream and whipped cream. She loves gummy bears, unsweet iced tea, and vanilla cream or caramel drizzle coffee.
The best trips she’s taken are over Christmas break, when she, along with her family, thirteen cousins, four aunts, three uncles, and grandma head to Deadwood, S.D. They rent a cabin and sled, tube and ski. The family has taken this trip three times, and she just loves it. Last year, they got snowed in in Deadwood and had the chance to do a lot more sledding.
Her parents, Dusty and Erin, love the role model she is for her younger siblings. “She’s a good example for them,” Dusty said. “She’s a good girl.”
Brooke didn’t junior high rodeo her sixth grade year, and last year, didn’t go to state finals because they were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
She has a younger sister, Allyx, her team roping partner, who is eleven; and brothers Jace, age nine, and Cade, who is five.
