Barrel Horse News: The Monthly Voice of Barrel Racing from Fort Worth
Barrel Horse News is a monthly magazine devoted entirely to barrel racing, the timed rodeo and Western performance event in which horse and rider circle three barrels in a cloverleaf pattern against the clock. Published from Fort Worth, Texas, and listed at barrelhorsenews.com, the magazine covers competition results, top horses and riders, training advice, horse health and industry news from across the barrel racing world. Few American magazines serve a single equine discipline so completely, and that focus has made the title a reference point for competitors, breeders, trainers and fans alike.
In February 2026 the magazine marked a major milestone, publishing a feature celebrating 30 years of publication. That anniversary confirmed its standing as a long-running specialist title: three decades after its launch, Barrel Horse News continues to produce a monthly print edition, an annual stallion guide, extensive digital coverage and event reporting that follows the sport from small regional races to the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas.
Overview
Barrel Horse News describes its mission as delivering comprehensive and timely coverage of the barrel racing industry. Its reporting ranges across regional and professional competition, futurities for young horses, derbies, rodeo, breeding and the wider business of the sport. Alongside results and standings, readers find in-depth training and horsemanship articles and features on horse health care, presented as practical guidance that competitors can apply to their own horses and programmes.
The magazine is based in Fort Worth, a city with deep ties to the Western performance horse world and home to several related Morris equine publications. It publishes twelve times a year, with one annual special, the Barrel Horse News Stallion Register. Morris Media Network has listed the magazine with a circulation of 22,000 and a readership of 68,000, figures that reflect both paid subscribers and the households reached through its association membership distribution.
History and Founding
Barrel Horse News was founded in 1996. Morris Media Network started it as a monthly magazine intended to provide the most comprehensive and timely coverage of the barrel racing industry, at a moment when the sport was organising itself nationally. In August 1992, the National Barrel Horse Association had been formed at a meeting at the corporate offices of Morris Communications in Augusta, Georgia, and the association became a division of Morris. The magazine followed four years later, giving that fast-growing association and the wider sport a dedicated publication.
The timing mattered. Barrel racing was expanding beyond its rodeo roots into a large circuit of association races, futurities and jackpots, and participants needed reliable results, statistics and reporting. A monthly magazine could record who won, which horses and bloodlines were succeeding, and how leading trainers worked. That documentary role, established in its first years, has remained central to the magazine ever since, through changes in media that have moved much day-to-day news online.
Publisher and Ownership
The magazine was created by Morris Communications and has been published as part of Morris Magazines and the Morris Media Network equine group, headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, with roots in Augusta, Georgia. Within that group it has sat alongside other long-established Western titles, including Western Horseman and Quarter Horse News, as well as the EquiStat statistical service, which tracks earnings and performance records across Western performance horse disciplines.
That stablemates arrangement shaped the magazine's character. Barrel Horse News could draw on the group's equine publishing experience, photography and statistical resources while keeping its own specialist editorial team focused on one sport. Its Fort Worth address, listed in industry directories at 2112 Montgomery Street, placed it in the same city as major Western performance horse organisations and events, keeping its reporters close to trainers, breeders and competitors they covered on a weekly basis throughout the competition season.
Official Publication of the National Barrel Horse Association
A defining feature of Barrel Horse News is its role as the official publication of the National Barrel Horse Association, described by Morris as the largest barrel racing association in the country. Every NBHA member household receives a subscription to the magazine, a distribution model that ties the print edition directly to the sport's organised membership and guarantees that association news, championship coverage and rule and programme information reach competitors in print.
The association connection is visible in the magazine itself: issues are identified as National Barrel Horse Association editions, and coverage of NBHA competition, including its Youth and Teen World Championships, forms a regular part of the editorial mix. For readers who are not association members, the arrangement still matters, because it places the magazine's reporters inside the sport's biggest events and gives its results coverage an official standing that purely commercial titles would struggle to match.
Editorial Content and Sections
Event coverage is the magazine's backbone. Reporters cover futurities, derbies, aged events, rodeos and championship races, recording times, placings, earnings and the stories behind them. The February issue traditionally highlights the newly crowned Women's Professional Rodeo Association barrel racing world champion and the round-by-round action from the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, coverage the magazine's editor has described as a celebration of historic moments, major wins and newly crowned champions across both futurity competition and the professional rodeo world.
Training and horsemanship content runs alongside the results. Features from leading trainers and clinicians answer common questions and break down pattern work, seasoning young horses and solving problems. Health and nutrition coverage, including special health issues, addresses subjects such as radiographs, facility fly control and kinesiology taping methods. Profiles of riders, horses, breeders and industry figures give the sport's personalities extended treatment, and pedigree and sire coverage connects competition results to the breeding decisions shaping the next generation of barrel horses.
Audience and Circulation
The audience is the barrel racing community itself: competitors from youth and amateur levels through to professional rodeo, plus trainers, breeders, stallion owners, mare owners and the families who support younger riders. Morris has presented the readership as loyal and long-established, noting in media materials that for more than three decades the magazine has been a go-to source for the sport. Its 2020 digital media kit reported an average of about 101,513 monthly pageviews and about 30,194 monthly unique visitors, alongside a Facebook following above 164,000 and an Instagram following near 79,900 at that time.
Those figures are dated snapshots rather than current counts, but they illustrate the shape of the readership: a print subscriber base anchored by association membership, extended by pass-along readership, and matched by a substantial online audience that follows results and features between issues. Advertisers in breeding, feed, tack, trailers and equine health use the magazine precisely because that audience is so narrowly and completely defined by one sport.
Print and Digital Editions
In print, Barrel Horse News appears monthly, with issues organised by volume and number; the February 2026 issue was Volume 31, No. 2. A significant print companion is the Barrel Horse News Stallion Register, published since 2011 and described by Morris as the leading stallion resource guide for mare owners in the industry. Mailed to all readers in November each year, it collects pedigrees, performance records and sire records in one place, and is also published digitally for tablets and smartphones.
Digitally, the magazine relaunched its website with staff blogs, expanded video, event and results tracking and statistical data from EquiStat. Its site organises coverage into categories such as event coverage, profiles, training and health, and publishes news between print issues. Digital editions of the print magazine are offered through an online publication platform, allowing subscribers to read issues on screen. Together, the print monthly, the annual register and the continuously updated website form a single editorial operation serving the same community.
Notable Editors and Contributors
In recent years the magazine has been led by editor-in-chief Kailey Sullins, whose columns introduce major issues, including the February championship coverage, and who has written event reporting from the National Finals Rodeo. Blanche Schaefer has served as managing editor and, in later listings, as a contributing editor, working closely with Sullins on editorial initiatives. Their partnership was visible in 2023, when the two editors reviewed applications for a new youth programme and spoke publicly about developing younger writers within the sport.
Contributors include staff writers and freelancers from inside the barrel racing world, among them Jessica Lash, whose work has included features in which expert trainers and clinicians answer their most frequently asked questions. Coverage also draws on specialist contributors for health, training and breeding subjects. The bylines matter in a community magazine of this kind: readers often know the trainers and riders being quoted personally, and the magazine's credibility rests on writers who compete, train or work within the industry themselves.
Awards, Recognition and the Youth Ambassador Programme
Formal recognition of the magazine has often come as part of the Morris Media Network Equine Group, whose publications have received multiple awards for achievements in equine publishing, including honours in American Horse Publications competitions for features, instructional series, photography and news reporting across the group. Barrel Horse News itself is recognised within the industry primarily through its official association role and its longevity: trusted-voice status, claimed in its own launch materials, is the kind of reputation a results-driven readership grants only to publications that get times, placings and records right.
A distinctive recent initiative was the Barrel Horse News Youth Ambassador programme, launched in spring 2023 as the magazine's first such scheme. From more than 30 applications, the editors selected finalists who were active competitors at major youth events, and ambassadors represented the magazine at the National High School Finals Rodeo and the NBHA Youth and Teen World Championships. The stated aim was to build interest in equine media and journalism while developing young racers' writing, communication and networking skills.
Recent Developments
The magazine entered its fourth decade in 2026 with the 30-year celebration feature published in February, reflecting on a history that began with the association era of the 1990s and now extends to streaming-era, data-rich coverage of the sport. Recent issues have continued the established pattern: championship and futurity coverage, sire and dam statistics, equine reproduction innovation, and profiles of leading riders and horses, including coverage of record-setting National Finals Rodeo qualifications and career earnings milestones tracked through EquiStat data.
For readers, the continuity is the point. Barrel Horse News still performs the job it was founded to do in 1996: record the sport accurately, explain how its best practitioners work, and connect a scattered national community of competitors through a shared monthly publication. Its website, at barrelhorsenews.com, remains the daily extension of that mission, while the print magazine and its November Stallion Register continue to serve as the sport's documents of record.
