The Breakaway Breakdown: Suzanne Faske on Son Elijah’s Breakaway Breakthrough - The Breakdown

0:00Welcome to season five of the Breakdown, the official podcast of the Breakway Roping Journal and caproping.com. This season we're diving in to both the Breakway and caproping like never before bringing you the personalities successes and horses that make these events great. You can expect training tips from top ropers, stories from the road, and industry news that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Hannah Mann, your host, and this is the Breakdown. Hey y'all, welcome back to the Breakdown. My name is Kallie Montague, your temporary host until the spot at the mic has been permanently filled. On this episode I get to talk with Suzanne Foskey, whose son Elijah has captured the hearts of rodeo and roping fans all across the country. Elijah is the 12-year-old cowboy who is roping legally blind and chases calves who wear homemade lighted collar aboard his paint pony Catalina. The video of him catching his first calf at a junior high rodeo down in Southeast Texas went viral, but there's so much more behind the flag dropping on that first clean run. This family story is so special and I can't wait to share it with you guys. Let's get into it. All righty. So let's start off with for those that haven't seen

1:01the video or have seen the video, but no, nothing else about y'all. Story about anything. Tell me about Elijah. So Elijah came to us when he was almost six years old. He came from he was born in China and has a birth defect that where one of his eyes was completely missing and the other eye has something called colaboma where he it's basically holes in his vision. So when he looks at someone, he there's blacked out areas and his brain just sort of connects the pieces and says, okay, that's a person. But even with having one eye missing and having colaboma in the eye, it is actually a natural eye. He also has very very low vision of 250 over 20. So when he came to us at almost six years old,

2:02he came from a disrupted adoption where a family had adopted him and did not feel like they could continue to parent town. And so then he came to stay with our family. Gotcha. And how old is he now? Did you say sorry? He's 12. Well, perfect, perfect. And then is he in school or anything or do you all homeschool? We homeschool. Gotcha. Perfect. So what's his personality like? Is he a rib bunches kid? Is he quiet? He keeps himself kind of tell me about his personality. So when he first came to us, he would throw a lot of fits. I'm a lot of that had to do with the fact that he has autism also. And he is on the spectrum, but on the high functioning end. Gotcha. But he doesn't really adapt well to change or anything like that. And so he was kind of the kiddo that got into a lot of trouble. He had a hard time making friends. And because

3:02of his low vision, he isn't allowed to do a lot of things because he physically can't do them. Right. So he would watch his brothers and sisters from the stands, although he couldn't really watch his brothers and sisters. He would sit in the stands with me. And he would get into a lot of trouble while he was in the stands because, you know, he was just bored and had nothing to do. And he couldn't really see what was going on in the arena. Right. So we let him start riding. And he's always kind of ridden since he first came into our family. But we're like trail rides and things that we just did as a family. But we let him start doing the little local play days and do barrel racing and poles and things like that when he was younger. And last summer he came to us and actually he didn't come to us. I overheard him telling a bunch of kids that he wasn't going to go in there for barrels because barrels was a girls

4:04event and he wasn't going to compete in barrels anymore. Right. So I talked to him and told him how that was really his only option. And so he did compete that day. But he started kind of digging his heels and didn't really want to compete in barrels and poles and things like that. And he said that he wanted to rope. And at home he had been working with Caleb and Caleb had been showing him how to rope the dummy and things like that. And he could do it in a very controlled situation with somebody helping him. Right. But we didn't really think that that would ever transfer over to riding to riding a horse and also, you know, roping from from the horse. Right. But he started just practicing a little bit at home and and then he went into enter and he said he didn't even care if he caught he just wanted to get to do the boy events instead of the girl events. And and some of the organizations that we

5:08participate in only have boy events. Right. For the boys. And so he ended up he ended up entering in breakaway. And he didn't have any success at all. And even in goats, he would we would just kind of send him out there and he would he couldn't see it until he could get close enough to the goat to hop off and and tie it. But breakaway was so much harder because the calf is actually running. Right. And so after a few times of him entering and not really having any success at all, we started talking to him about what he could see and a friend of ours specifically asked him, you know, which casts colors easier for you to see. And, you know, what what what times

6:08what things have to happen for you to be able to see the calf the best. Right. And he explained that he couldn't really see the calves when they were on the dark dirt, especially if they were a brown calf or a black calf. Okay. He said he really liked the black and white calves like the whole whole scene calves because he could see a little bit of the contrast to see what he was roping. Right. But as you know, you can't really pick your calf. Right. Right. Right. That's kind of ours. So yes. So you have to take what you get. And that's when we started talking about, so what can we do if he if he says that he can see the black and white, what if we put a white collar, a white lighted collar on the black calves and see if that helps him out. And so we did that and we also added a bell. But the bell seemed to make the calf run

7:09even faster just to get away from the noise. Right. So we took the bell off. And so now he's just roping with a lighted collar. So let's shift gears for just a second. So I know you've mentioned a couple times. Y'all have a big you texted it to me and then we've already kind of talked about it. You have a big adopted family. How did that come about if you don't mind me asking? Have you always adopted? Do you have any kiddos of your own? Do you mind me asking that? Just tell me the story on the rest of your family. So we have been adopting our oldest daughter or our first the first child that we adopted is 1.95. So she will be she is 30. And she was adopted from India. And we really thought we were going to have this big family. We were going to have two biological children and adopt two children. That was our plan. And we thought that was a big family at the time. And then we ended up

8:11traveling to adopt Sarah from India. And when we were there there was just such poverty. And you could I was able to stay at her orphanage and have lunch with the kids and things like that. And when we were done the kids were crawling under the table just picking up every little grain of rice that they could get. Wow. And you just you saw the poverty and you we came home and and we just felt like okay we can adopt one more. And so we just kept going back for one more or then we adopted the sibling you know sibling groups and things like that. And then we ended up with children from seven different countries and ten different languages. Wow. In our home. And I started praying that when we adopted our daughter Miriam it was a very long adoption. And I had actually chose where we were adopting from because it was

9:14so quick and I was a very impatient person. And so God really taught me a lesson in that because it ended up taking about six times longer than what we were expecting. Wow. And so I started praying that God would just bring him and leave him at our doorstep. And he did. He's leaving kids at our doorstep. Wow. It was but they weren't babies you know they weren't young children and a lot of them were children that were not succeeding in the family that they were in and had a lot of a lot of trauma and hurt from the situations that they came into before they were that they came from before they were adopted. Right. And so at one point my husband was like can you please just stop praying that because there's so many children dropped up at our door. Oh how funny. So I did and we still had children that came to our family after that but

10:19that's kind of how our family grew. Right. Just going and visiting some of these places and seeing how awful the situations were in so many cases. And we've we really have a heart for special needs kids for kids with disabilities and and so we have kids with all kinds of disabilities. We have a daughter who barrel races still and she's an adult but her legs are paralyzed because she has polio. Wow. And so she rides with a seatbelt. It's very similar to Amberly. Snyder but it's different too because Joy never had the use of her legs. Right. Right. Right. So she had to kind of learn and she taught her own horse and everything how to run barrels just on voice command. Oh cool. And but you know it was a little bit different because she never knew what it was like to do it in any in a different way. Right.

11:21Not like she had an incident that made that happen. Gotcha. Yes. That's exactly right. Gotcha. So but a lot of our kids have some sort of disability. Gotcha. My mom is a or not is currently but was a special a teacher for most of my life. So I've been around quite a few of those kiddos and it's it's pretty special watching them be successful in whatever being successful means in their life but it's very special to get to watch that. Right. And a lot of the kids a lot of our children they're not they don't have an intellectual disability at all. Gotcha. They just have a physical disability that makes things harder for them. We have another daughter that she's a senior this year in region seven and she does break away and all the roping events too. Awesome. But she and she's also missing an eye but in her other eye her good eye that she can actually see with she has perfect vision. Nice. So for her it's not really

12:22that big of an adjustment you know she just has a little bit of a difference in depth perception. Gotcha. Very cool. So with all the kiddos that y'all have had have all of them been in the rodeo world or is it just kind of y'all let them decide if they want to or not or is it something you encourage what's have they all kind of been involved in that. So all of our kids have been involved with horses. Okay. And most of them did the local play days and things like that but not at the same level as the group that we have now. Gotcha. Gotcha. So over the years we've adopted 28 children. Wow. So and we have three and we have three biological children because those are homemade kids. homemade kids that's hilarious. And there are two um we have two older sons that are in their 30s and then we have a daughter that competes at seven that she just turned 16 a couple days ago. Gotcha. Do you have a background in rodeo? I mean how did

13:27the is that something you and your husband have done your whole lives like where did the interest come from for y'all? Um I did play days and you know at a local level when I was a kid but my father died when I was 16 years old and you know everything had to kind of stop at that point. Right. And so I continued to have horses and when my husband and I got married I had a couple of horses then and um my husband was more of a cattleman and so he kind of adapted to having horses and and all that comes with that and all the expenses that come with that and we else our kids did do local play days and things like that and then I guess it was not quite two years ago. A friend of ours came to us and said you should enter your kids in high school rodeo and I really didn't think that was an option for them. I didn't feel like they

14:30were at that level to compete. But we did it anyway and we kind of looked at it as this will be a great time of growth for them and if anything it'll kind of pull them up and help them to work towards something and to our surprise we had an amazing first year and um two of our kids got rookie of the year, rookie boy and rookie girl and and then we had our son got all around rookie I mean all around cowboy and and he won four saddles and Sophia won two saddles and it was crazy how well they did and so um this is our second year competing in him. Awesome so they've been rodeoing for a little while but just not at the high school level high school junior high stuff. Yes that's correct. Gotcha. So one last question just about your all of your kiddos and we'll get back to

15:33Elijah's viral moment here shortly but in your own words how what do you think they take away by having kiddos that maybe weren't introduced to it early on? What do you think is there is the biggest benefit of including them in the rodeo world? Well I think that with my children they all of my children come from some type of trauma background. Okay. Whether that was abuse or neglect or severe poverty or lack of medical care that they didn't receive things like that and they all come with a trauma history and I believe that there's something really amazing about the outside of a horse for the inside of a human and I feel like it has really helped them to grow and to heal and to be able to overcome barriers in so many ways not just physically but even emotionally.

16:36Gotcha. Perfect. Well it does that for people that don't have a trauma background so it's amazing what it will do for people that have been through things like that. Absolutely perfect. Taking a quick break to jump in here until you guys a little bit about roping.com. With a roping.com membership you can get unlimited access to roping.com's comprehensive tie down breakaway and team roping video library and learn from world champions Caleb Schmidt and Shad Mayfield as well as top trainers Logan Harkey and Justin Moss. Plus you can bench hundreds of hours of live and

17:41archived ropings including the cinch timed event championship and the Patriot events the legendary Spicer grip and Mobata ropings and more. All righty let's talk about the the video that went crazy which is how I found out about that. I'm from Texas I actually rodeoed in region six most of my life and then moved to 10. Yeah so I'm very familiar where y'all are at and like I used to junior rodeo in Eden so I are not in Eden excuse me in Eden so I very much am aware but I just can't believe I've never heard of

18:41y'all before I saw the video go viral so how cool was it when he caught that first calf at the rodeo. I mean I know the stance what crazy but as his mom how special was that when he first caught that calf? You know honestly I didn't think he was going to do it that day. You know we we we were trying to get him to throw like right outside of the shoot because that gives him the best shot right and he kind of has an idea where the calf is going to be but that day he had tracked the calf all the way to the other end right and what we've seen is that he does not usually have any success when that happens because he just loses the calf when it gets too far out into that big of a open space and everything and everybody was kind of screaming at him telling him which way to turn and everything and then when they when he threw that shot and it went on everybody just screamed and hollered and it was just it was amazing to be

19:43to be there and to hear it and I had hoped it would happen at some point but I had kind of gotten discouraged and I think there was a lot of pressure because everybody wanted to see him succeed at it and and that's a great feeling to have that kind of support right but you also don't want to disappoint them in any way and so it was you know yeah I felt like I I was starting to kind of give up that it wasn't going to happen right um but it did that day yeah very cool what was his reaction was he excited what was his initial reaction oh he was so happy and smiling and then when it was all over with I went down to the from the stands and he came and gave me a high five as he left the arena and um oh sorry I'm getting kind of emotional okay that's all right it's very cool it's just so neat to see him succeed at something because it has been

20:45such a struggle for him right and that has been really cool too because I think this little taste of success has really truly changed him too um he's just he's been so well behaved lightly and he's offering to help with things and it really has transformed his life just feeling successful at something right for sure well so then I was right for this I went back and I found the second video where he like stuck it on one quickly I mean do you think that he knows how do you think he knows how cool what he is doing is or do you think he's just excited to be getting included I mean do you think he feels how special it is I don't think he realizes what's happening I don't think he understands um how viral this has went right he's a little boy just chasing his dreams and

21:46and doesn't even realize what's all's going on right that's practiced like every night he practices and perfect you know he'll just he'll wrote the dummy and um you know he'll he it's like he's given it's given him this drive to want to do better and to want this to succeed yeah and the timing could not have been any more perfect because um the we I think it was the weekend before that had happened um he had actually or as a few weeks before that had happened he had actually caught two calves at um at a small playday in south Texas and um he felt really good about things and then he went through kind of a slump where he didn't catch anything for a while and the weekend before he actually caught that first one at junior high um he came to me and he was he left the arena crying which had never

22:47happened before right um and you could just see the frustration and he and I asked him you know what was going on and he said and this is not how he talks but this is what he said that day he said mom I just suck he said I I'm never I'm never going to be able to do this or thing um and big old tears coming out of his eyes I told them you do not talk that way you know you need to you need to think differently and and just keep trying and and at that point he was he it seemed like he was slapping him in the back of the head with the rope every single time right you know couldn't get it around and looking back I think we figured that out this weekend what was going on then was he was pulling his slack when he thought he had them right but it wasn't he was pulling a slap too soon right and now his new thing is is that he's not pulling a slack and says so this weekend at regions

23:51um his calf went right through his loop yeah and I've I looked back at the pictures and I can tell he's not pulling a slack right so we'll think that that's what's going on um and he's just kind of having to it to figure it out as we go and I think he learned that pulling his slack he wasn't catching he was you know pulling it too soon right and now his new tactic has been I'm not going to pull my slack yeah and now we're having some trouble with that too so um with the next time we wrote we're going to actually have Caleb tell him when to pull a slack yeah because he can really tell if it's on or not right right he can kind of see him but can't tell when the rope goes around the night yes gotcha well that's I mean that's anybody's bad how I've roped calves my entire life and that's that's very typical breakaway stuff he's going through it's just cool that he can work through it and again winning I think

24:52gives anybody motivation to work through the slumps you know so that's he's not going through anything the rest of us aren't going through so yes and um in a couple of weeks he's going to equine champions for Christ cool to rope with um Strand Smith and um Trevor Hale and Tough Cooper not Tough Cooper Cliff Cooper and Stets Invest and his his brother has went to that a few times now and Eli wasn't able to go but this is his first time and I really feel like they're going to be able to help him to work through some of the issues too yeah um so that he can you know go to the next level and everything for sure camps like that are so special oh yeah they are absolutely perfect well um I meant to ask you this earlier when we were kind of talking about the caller but is that something is the caller something y'all

25:56developed or was that kind of already developed and y'all just saw it and found out it would work for him or did y'all did y'all have a hand in developing that so Sterling Miriamann is a friend of ours and he was one of the guys that originally um had the conversations with Eli about what we could see and what we couldn't see gotcha um and he had the idea of the cast of the caller around the neck and he actually had he works cattle for a living and he had a dog collar that had a light on it um for when you're working cattle right during the night and everything you could actually tell where the dogs were right and so that's what we started that was using that collar but and we tried that and we saw that that would work but a lot of times it would fall to it was just like one light on top and then a lot of times it would fall to under the neck right and so um we ended up just try i ordered something

27:02online it's just it's honestly just a Christmas light um dog collar nice and so and it has the lights all the way around and he says it's much easier for him to see how cool and when i say easier that that's not that's probably not the right way relative for him yes for him it's easier perfect and if it turns it's still the same right yeah it's the the lights are around no matter what yes gotcha so tell me about the paint pony what's the story behind his pony okay so Catalina she was born on our place and um she was trained by some of his older siblings and his brother used her last year for calf roping but then he graduated and so um Eli was actually riding a different horse but actually her mother is who he was riding cool and her name was Ruby and we had some friends that needed a

28:06horse um for their quadrupling granddaughters wow and they had bought a couple other horses from us and so they came back to buy another horse from us and we decided to sell Ruby with Eli's permission and he felt like he could handle stepping up to the next horse and so that's how he ends up on Catalina cool how old is she she is 17 perfect so was there with the lighted collar then was there anything like how did she react to that I mean is it bright enough that she kind of notices it and shy's away or did shy away or was it all pretty a smooth process she's pretty dead broke yeah she just takes care of him yeah that's awesome so what was the I know he talked about kind of when he learned to ride when he started but was there any struggle or did he just take to like learning to swing a rope on a horse is hard for anybody so I can only imagine

29:09for and for a kid it's hard so what was there any struggle there did he just kind of take to it like a fish to water um he really took to it fairly easily because he had been wanting to do it for so long and had been you know swinging a rope on the ground for for several years already um but it's not thinking that he could possibly do it on a horse or actually rope something from the back of a horse but he took to it really quickly honestly if there was some things like you know it's just a lot and I think roping is a lot for anyone for sure and you know having to get up in your seat and stand up in your stirrups and and swing a rope and rain your horse and it's just a lot for sure so it did take a little bit for him to do that part he he didn't want it it wasn't that he didn't want so he struggled with getting up in his seat yeah that's hard that takes muscles that normal people

30:13don't even like people that don't rope don't understand but that takes muscles that it's like people that just you know exercise even people that go to the gym it doesn't matter that the particular muscles in your body that it takes to throw yourself to the front of a moving object it's like trying to stand up in a moving car I mean it's the same yes it's the physics so the same so I can I struggle with it and I'm an adult that I you know it's hard for anybody yes Caleb has honestly been the driving force behind Eli and has just whatever the issue is he's come up with a way to help him work through it and and I remember on one day they were in the arena and Eli was you know sitting down who was loathing and Caleb was trying to get him to get up in his seat and to to ride like standing up right and and to be forward in his seat so that when he you know was roping that he could be forward and so he was trying to teach him how to load and everything and I just had a laugh because he went to the tank dam and got a bunch of rocks

31:17until Eli's pockets for sure that down the rocks and poke him oh yeah that's that's old school we've all had that dandas at one point or another no Caleb is my son okay sorry sorry he's just a year older than Eli gotcha and he's a he's an amazing little roaper and very successful on everything that he does but he has always just wanted Eli to get to be like the other kids right that's cool and so he has been super helpful and instrumental in in helping Eli find the success awesome that's special when they get to do it together yes it is oh as the mom do you get nervous when he roaps or really when any of your kids compete do you get super nervous are you pretty laid back and just whatever happens happens um I feel like with when joy barrel races I honestly I should

32:18go sit in the truck because it is real hard for me to watch her do that um strapped in right it's just kind of a scary thing for me and we have a son who has severe hemophilia a and that means he's a free bleeder and his blood doesn't stop and he is a roaper he's the one that um that rode Catalina before before Eli did and he has to wear a helmet hat when he competes because um it's he's just at such high risk of a brain bleed right and so I don't mind watching him rope but when things go wrong it scares me to death honestly of course um and he does have to he has to infuse like with an IV in his arm and stuff for his blood to clot so that he can compete and it really scares me but honestly with Eli I haven't been scared at all because he just

33:19it I think Catalina just really takes care of him and puts him in the position he needs to be in she's never um hot in the box she's just really well behaved and she can be a little much with somebody else but with Eli it's like she knows she has to take care of him and she's always very well behaved that's awesome that's one of the special things about horses is they they almost always know even the good ones know they just might forget but they always know who's riding them yes that's right and I feel like I feel like when Jonathan backs her into the box she can be a little much you know she starts moving around and she may even rare up a couple times not big rarers but a smaller smaller version of it and just gets a little antsy but when Eli is in the box she's just perfect that's awesome well you guys that is it for this episode it was so cool getting to talk to the wonder woman of a mom that Suzanne is and getting to hear her and her

34:22family's amazing story this is cal signing off we'll catch you on the next episode of the breakdown