Amy Wilson

Television's Female in Rodeo

- By Susan L. Ebert

Twenty-seven years ago, a first-grader wrote the following on a scrap of now-faded lined notepaper:

“When I grow up I want to be in rodeos all over the world and a mom and Miss America and a wife and a singer and a model and a baby sitter and a farmer and have a ranch and I want to be a veterinarian and an artist.”

Says Amy Wilson, the 33-year-old blonde dynamo who long ago committed those goals to paper, “Back then, I didn’t know there was such a thing as Miss Rodeo America,” she laughs, “or I would have included that, too.” Wilson, who was crowned Miss Rodeo Kansas in 2007, achieved her Miss Rodeo America title in 2008.

Still, her path to where she is currently—as co-host along with Steven Kenyon of Western Sports RoundUp, which airs five days a week on The Cowboy Channel and is simulcast on Sirius XM’s Rural Radio at SMX147, and its primary field reporter and show host for 18-plus Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association rodeo broadcasts and for National Finals Rodeo 2020—predates her Miss Rodeo America reign to her gritty beginnings on her parents’ family cattle ranch in Colby, Kansas.

The second oldest of Lonnie and Lori Wilson’s six children, Amy grew up doing ranch chores, helping to care for her younger siblings, and riding whenever she could. By age 9, she had started working at the sale barn, saving money from that and from her 4-H endeavors to buy her own Black Angus cows. Throughout it all, she continued to ride and rodeo.