Cami and Sierra Lewis have carried the Lewis name from both sides of the arena—Cami on the road beside Brent Lewis through his NFR years, and Sierra building some of calf roping’s earliest social media, much of it with her little brother, 2026 ProRodeo Resistol Rookie Contender Sam Lewis, in mind. 

Sierra graduated from high school in 2015, part of the generation that watched Instagram show up and figured it was just a photo filter. And she grew up in the mainstream world, not the rodeo one. Her friends knew her dad was a rodeo cowboy, and that was about it. 

“I got a Twitter so I could follow One Direction,” Sierra said. 

Tie Down Tuesday 

As a college freshman, before the family moved from Arizona to Texas in 2017, Sierra made Brent a Facebook page to post his sale horses. YouTube came next. 

Then she took it to Instagram with a hashtag she called Tie Down Tuesday. Post your run with the tag, and the page would share it. Some mornings she woke up to Brent Lewis tagged 20 times. 

“It’s no secret the calf ropers love a little bit of self-exposure, let’s say,” Sierra said. “What do I know that they like that I can market over here?” 

The answer came from her other world. 

“I’m very into pop culture. I’m very into mainstream media,” she said. “And I was like, well, what if we made really cool calf roping videos that gets the people going, gets the people excited.” 

She started cutting old NFR runs to rap music, many of them pulled from recordings her grandmother had bought of every NFR Brent roped at. That was before the Cowboy Channel was airing its NFR archives, and long before her dad, who can’t stand the music, ever saw them. 

“I asked for forgiveness before I ask for permission,” she said. “That’s probably like a Lewis thing in general.” 

Rodeo edits set to rap music are all over rodeo social media now and Sierra has a pretty good idea where a lot of it started. 

“I’m not trying to clap for myself or anything, but if we look back at the dates, there’s probably receipts,” she said.  

Built for Sam 

The whole time, Sierra had a specific audience in mind.  

Sam was a kid then, and she was deep in the junior roping world with him, watching boys who already knew the old guys were legends. She wanted them to have calf roping media of their own. 

“I was building something for Sam, with all of this in mind,” Sierra said. “I really was building it all for the little boys.” 

Her pitch to them was simple. 

“If you think they’re so fun, you should have seen them 20 years ago,” she said. 

She interned at the Cowboy Channel the year it launched, worked with Casey Jones on Pro Fantasy Rodeo, and ran live Tie Down Tuesday Q&As with her dad that some nights drew 25 or 30 questions.  

Today, when Brent has something to say about the state of the sport, Sierra is usually the one who writes it. 

“When we need to voice something that’s going on in the rodeo world, I’m the one that usually writes those,” she said. 

None of it ever meant she wanted to be in the arena herself. 

“You’d truly have to hold me down if you wanted to put a cowboy hat on me,” Sierra said. “I’m not going to get a horse ready, and I’m not going to be responsible for a horse, and I want to go on vacation, and I don’t care what time the horses are fed.” 

On the Road 

Cami’s road didn’t start as a hard-core competitor herself. Her dad had a horse and roped a little, her sister rodeoed in college, and Cami roped and ran barrels once she got to college herself. 

She was teaching school when mutual friends Denton Payne and Rube Woolsey introduced her to Brent one night in Scottsdale. They met in October. By May, they were married. 

“I quit my job, and from then on, I pretty much went with him all the time,” Cami said. 

When Sierra was born in August 1996, she simply joined the trip. Cami went home six or seven weeks before the baby came and met Brent back on the road in Albuquerque, New Mexico, afterward. 

“Sierra and I went with him almost all the time,” Cami said. “There wasn’t much time that he was gone more than a week and a half or two weeks that we didn’t maybe go.” 

Sierra was 4 months old at her first NFR and in second grade when her dad roped at his last one. She remembers more of it than most people would guess—the water park in Vernal, Utah, the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, the M&M factory, and the pirate show at Treasure Island, where her parents got married. Mostly, she remembers the women. 

The calf ropers of that era didn’t go easy on each other. There were fist fights, and there were meetings where nobody backed down. The wives and girlfriends—her mom, Cassie Whitfield and Jenna Beaver among them—were a different story. 

“They were the biggest of enemies in the arena, but it wasn’t that way outside of the arena,” Sierra said. “Anyone was willing to take me and play with me and take me to the carnival and entertain me.” 

“That family aspect of it and the friendship aspect of it really, truly shaped my childhood,” she said. “It’s really the company that you kept, and everyone kept each other’s company back then.” 

Letting Go 

Brent retired from ProRodeo in 2005. Sam’s rodeo years started with kid ropings and high school rodeo, and Cami found out being a rodeo mom was its own job. 

“It’s way easier to be a rodeo wife, I think. It’s, I don’t know, lot less pressure,” Cami said. “We just wanted Sam to be successful for his own self. You also didn’t want to push him. If he didn’t like it, then don’t do it. It’s okay.” 

“Rodeo certainly doesn’t define you,” she said. “Rodeo does not make who you are, what you’re going to be as an adult.” 

Sierra’s own career has carried the West the other direction. Now a represented model, she walked her first New York Fashion Week show for designer Paige Calloway, an Alberta-raised cowgirl who trained in couture in London and has shown in Milan. 

Sierra helped bring the team from home, including 7X custom jewelry, Guy and Cole Yarborough, photographer Will Jennings, and breakaway roper Lariat Adams, who worked into the night with her partner Jordan to make a custom belt for every model.  

She puts Calloway’s work in terms her dad would understand. 

“You got a good clapper bit, and then you got something made from China that you get off the wall,” she said. “Which one is my dad going to use? He’s going to use the clapper.” 

At the end of October, she heads to the Harvard Kennedy School for a program built around disability advocacy. 

“I’m going to hit the Ivy League books for a while,” she said. 

Sam, meanwhile, has made plenty of noise of his own. He won his first ProRodeo title at San Angelo for $16,102, won Ellensburg with 27.0 on three head for $11,960, and sits No. 4 in the Resistol Rookie standings with $56,495. He’s in college now, and he didn’t really want his parents at the rodeos. For a family that had always gone together, that took some getting used to. 

“It’s been a hard transition for us to realize that we’re not going to the ropings with him,” Cami said. “We really missed high school rodeo. We enjoyed all of our friendships.” 

Sierra misses something else for him: the brotherhood she grew up around.  

The rivals of her dad’s era were close once they left the arena, and those friendships lasted. Joe Beaver and that group are still some of Brent’s greatest friends, and Jerry Jetton is still “Uncle” Jerry. 

“I think there’s a camaraderie and a family sense that has been lost in the calf ropers, because we were really so close,” Sierra said. 

With spread-out draws and slack schedules, today’s ropers don’t run in the same pack, and that’s the part she wishes her brother had. 

“I miss that for Sam,” Sierra said. “I wish that there was more of a friendship and a kinship. I think everyone kind of isolates themselves nowadays.” 

The old guys feel it, too, and Sierra has been the voice of reason, telling them tides change no matter what. 

“When people say, oh, rodeo is a family, they don’t say it as much, but it’s not as true today as it was then,” she said. “It was super true, and I hope it finds its way back.” 

Cami says she and Brent are finally getting better at watching from a distance. Her advice for the next rodeo mom comes from living both sides of it. 

“Stay positive,” Cami said. “Know that it’s okay if they’re not including you in everything, and learn your boundaries and figure out where you’re kind of more needed. That is your goal in life, is to let your kid go and to be successful.”