Staples-Motley’s Turner Beachy is a pole vaulter, rodeo cowboy, musician and, especially, an expert at mind control

Turner Beachy is scared of only one thing.

It’s certainly not launching himself through the air while pole vaulting. In fact, he shuts his eyes when he’s airborne. That keeps his gaze from darting around to the clouds, the trees, the horizon.

“I see myself better in my head with my eyes closed,” Beachy said. “When I see my surroundings, I tend not to focus.”

On this day, a hazy June morning in Staples, Beachy needed to focus. The pursuit was pole vaulting, and he was fine-tuning technique with Staples-Motley vaulting coach Marly Simmons before the track and field state meet.

At another time of year he’d have been learning a wrestling move. Or studying football footwork.

Beachy is a self-described adrenaline junkie, and he acknowledges he deals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He tackles both through sports, and has found state-championship-level success along the way — including his first Class 1A pole vaulting state title on Tuesday, vaulting a personal-best 15 feet.

But the sport Beachy hopes to pursue long-term isn’t one with a Minnesota State High School League medal as a reward. Rather, he’s collecting belt buckles.

Turner Beachy wants to be a rodeo cowboy in college.

Beachy, a 17-year-old junior, finished eighth in Class 1A in pole vault as a sophomore. This spring, Beachy broke a school record once held by his dad and entered Tuesday’s state meet with the sixth-best mark in Minnesota this season, plus a goal: to “not let my mind lock up.”

If that happens, “it’s all just a blur,” he said. “You’re thinking way too many things at once.”

At training, Simmons turned his phone toward Beachy, showing him slo-mo video of his latest attempt, just short. “My eyes are open,” Beachy said, surprised. Then, a joke: “Never claimed to be an athlete.”

Simmons said his coaching approach acknowledges Beachy’s style.

“Make them think now,” he said, “so they don’t have to think when the time comes.”

When the time came Tuesday, Beachy cleared 13-6, then 14, then 14-6. Clearing 14-9 won him the title, and finally he hit 15.

“I felt confident through the whole meet,” he said. “You just kind of get alone in your own mind. If you vault the way you see it in your head, you should be pretty close to perfect.”

Carrie Beachy remembers her creative, energetic toddler bundling up to spend hours outside in the northern Minnesota winter.

“I don’t know what wonderful adventures he was making in his mind,” she said.

Beachy is the youngest of 14 grandkids — “the last one of this clan,” Carrie said. His grandfather, Ron Beachy, who died in April 2024, led the Staples-Motley track and field program for over 50 years.

Beachy’s dad, Arden, was a quarterback and pole vaulter at North Dakota State. Beachy’s sister, Jaelin, older by 12 years, won three straight Class 1A state titles in the 100-meter hurdles before going on to compete for North Dakota State University’s track team.

So channeling Turner’s energy into athletics made sense.

“We just knew, the busier we kept him, the less trouble we were likely to have,” Carrie said.

In pre-K, Beachy tried wrestling, T-ball and basketball. Standing in the grassy outfield didn’t suit him. And when he turned defense into a full-contact endeavor, his basketball coaches would holler, “Turner Beachy, this is not wrestling!”

Wrestling endured. This winter, Beachy and Staples-Motley won the Class 1A team championship. Beachy placed third in the individual 139-pound class.

Like with pole vaulting, “if I grab you, I can wrestle you with my eyes closed,” Beachy said.

He and the Cardinals’ football team reached the Prep Bowl for the first time last fall. Beachy was a 5-foot-8 defensive back and running back for the Class 2A runner-up.

Beachy could follow in his family’s track-and-field footsteps, or lean into his wrestling or football talent. It’s hard to find something he can’t do if shown a video and asked to mimic it.

But instead, Beachy knows: “I could get strapped to the top of a horse, if I really wanted to.”

Beachy’s biggest fear also isn’t getting thrown off Ellie — even after, earlier that week, the horse stood straight up, spooked, and dumped him.

Ellie stays at a friend’s farm in Ottertail, and Beachy has made trips to train her since the Ahlfs family got her a year ago. Then, she was a testy horse that hadn’t been ridden in years.

“She runs super anxious,” Beachy said. He can tell by her ears; that’s how horses are. “They’re more people than people are,” he said.

When he was growing up, some of Beachy’s family and friends had horses, or rodeoed, or both, but few gravitated toward the sport quite like he did.

During elementary school summers at Camp Shamineau near Motley, Beachy was tasked to ride Flash, a speedy horse no kid could get a hold of. When that went well, Beachy was given another nut to crack: A horse no one could make trot. He managed that in tennis shoes, no spurs needed.

At home, he watched roping videos, fashioned a pair of old jeans into chaps and began lassoing with spools of dock line. Soon, no one was safe walking through the living room. His parent’s ankles. “Our poor dog,” Carrie said.

A former wrestling and football teammate helped point Beachy toward rodeo competitions. That led to summers in South Dakota, fixing fences and working with animals at a ranch. In warm months, he works the pro-am rodeo circuit, he and a partner mounting horses and roping calves together, head and heel. They’re scored by judges, and winners earn a buckle.

“I just love it so much. It’s just so fun. I’m athletic, I’m fast, so it won’t scare me as much,” Beachy said. “Once you know how animals are, they’re all patterned.”

As he finishes up with Ellie for the day, he shows off a trick — standing on her saddle, calm, still.

Clearing his mind is necessary here, too. Especially here.

“I’m not really thinking anything,” he said. “I’m not thinking what she’s thinking. I’m thinking, just make her better, calm, because they feel you.”

“See,” he told Ellie, clambering down. “You’re not a bad horse.”

Two months ago, Beachy told family, “This summer is my figuring-my-life-out summer.”

In past summers, Beachy packed his schedule with college football and wrestling camps. He would travel up to Fargo for NDSU pole vaulting clinics, and his grandfather, who had moved to Moorhead in his later years, would come out to watch him train.

Now Beachy plans to fill his summer with riding and roping, eyeing collegiate rodeo programs. Some are sanctioned varsity teams at smaller schools, others ultra-competitive club programs at state universities including kids from areas where high school rodeo looms large.

“On our third kid, you just learn that it’s best if you expose him to a lot of things and let them decide what they want to do,” said Arden, who slipped Beachy pole vaulting advice through the fence at state. “They can’t live your dream. They’ve got to live their dream.”

Singing. That’s Beachy’s biggest fear.

Beachy strums his guitar with hands on which “there’s not a finger that hasn’t been dislocated less than twice,” he said. As with roping, he’s self-taught from watching YouTube videos. He uses a guitar pick handmade from a Dairy Queen gift card.

“I have a creative mind,” Beachy said. “I didn’t really buy into that, until recently.”

He grew up performing in the Central Minnesota Boys Choir, dropped off after football practice — another thing to keep him busy. After much prodding, Beachy began singing at open mics hosted by the Ahlfs family at a nearby cidery. He turned down the chance “from the time I was 10, until 15.”

When asked what he could see Beachy pursuing in the future, Joe Ahlfs nodded toward the teenager pulling out his guitar. This.

After a morning of vaulting, then riding, “this is the first time I’ve started sweating,” Beachy said before performing “Lone Ole Cowboy” from Texas songwriter Dylan Gossett.

“Singing is the scariest thing you’ll ever do in your life, I can promise you,” he said.

And yet, when Beachy is singing, or playing guitar, “my mind is way clearer.”

“I can sit and look at the sky,” he said, “and my mind won’t be as clear as when I’m playing.”