Junior Cloey Thompson’s sport is rodeo barrel racing. She said she rides four days a week. “Just the bond you have with your horse, honestly,” Thompson said, “and all the friends that come with the rodeo [are my favorite aspects of the sport].” Photo courtesy of EMDukat Photography.

Many students in high school have to wake up early, work hard, take time out of their weekends and make many more sacrifices for activities they participate in. Several of these are extracurricular clubs and sports that their school hosts. Others are entirely outside of school and can be less popular, yet take just as much time and energy. Cloey Thompson, a junior at GHS, is a barrel racer who rides in rodeos. The activity is important to her.

According to Silver Spurs Rodeo, an 80-year-old rodeo association, “barrel racing is a fast-paced event that requires the rider to successfully maneuver a horse in a cloverleaf pattern around three barrels placed in a triangle formation in the center of the arena.” The sport can be exciting, time-consuming, and as is the case with Thompson, a huge part of a participant’s life.

“I ride, like four times a week, but I’m out there every morning and night feeding,” Thompson said.

This daily dedication and effort is just a small example of how much rodeos matters to anyone who practices one of its events. As with any sport, the work put into it is not at all without reward. There are several things that make rodeo enjoyable, she said, including cash prizes. Her favorite part, however, is being with her horse, Sparkle.

“You can win a lot of money doing it,” Thompson said. “Just the bond you have with your horse, honestly, and all the friends that come with the rodeo [are my favorite aspects of the sport].”

Although it is not represented at school as an activity, rodeo has its own community that supports the people within it. It also is not completely without drawbacks.

“The best thing is probably just the community, how nice people are, and how helpful people are,” Thompson said. “And the worst thing is probably when you do bad. It’s just not fun, but it’s part of it.”

Often, activities outside of school can be hard to get into. Being introduced to the sport for Thompson, though, was not a complicated process.

“Honestly, [my family] went to a rodeo and we watched it, and it looked like it’d be fun. So, we bought a horse, and we’ve bought four since then,” she said.

Thompson is not the only person from Gretna who barrel races. Kylee Ruff, a GHS alumni, also did so in middle school, high school and still does in college. She believes that rodeos should be implemented into and represented at the high school level.

“Putting rodeos in schools would just be very beneficial for students. There are so many sports that students do that are recognized and represented, but rodeo isn’t one of them,” Ruff said. “But it totally could be. People are always surprised when they find out I do rodeo, because it’s not really a thing that gets advertised to those who don’t already do it or engage with it.”

At this point, there are no plans for the NSAA to recognize rodeo as a high school sport.