Abstract A single fiber crosses a crack in Strain-Hardening Cementitious Composites (SHCC) can be either perpendicular or inclined to the crack surface. When the single fiber pullout test is performed on inclined polymeric fibers, the peak pull-out load is commonly observed to increase with the inclination angle. Usually the fiber is modeled as a flexible string passing over a frictional pulley, and the observed phenomenon is explained by the high local friction (or snubbing effect) near the fiber exiting point. However, such an explanation is not perfectly satisfactory because the bending stiffness of the fiber is not necessarily negligible and the pulley does not physically exist. In this study, a new model which treats the fiber as a beam and emphasize on the large deflection effect of the fiber is developed. The entire fiber bridging stress vs crack opening relationship can be derived and the empirical snubbing effect is also revealed, even without assuming the presence of a frictional pulley. Moreover, at small crack opening, the predicted trend of bridging force with inclination angle from the new model is in better agreement with test results than the snubbing friction model.