Earlier I wrote about the top 5 things to know about college rodeo athletes. Now I think you all are ready to learn more about college rodeo. Fasten your seatbelts people, we’re going on a wild ride.

1. We pay for everything out of pocket.

There are a ton of expenses that go with being a rodeo competitor, but somehow being in college the prices seem to skyrocket, a lot. We are responsible for paying for everything, entry fees, fuel, food, feed for our horses, hotels, and any miscellaneous costs. It is nothing to spend $500 or more for one rodeo.

2. Yes, that is our duly parked next to your Prius.

How else are we supposed to get our horses to and from the rodeos? We bring our own pickup and trailer to school, the school does not provide transportation for us to get our horses where they need to be. Some schools have a trailer that the team can use, but that is for traveling to the sanctioned rodeos not simply to get to school.

3. Just because money flies out of our pockets quicker than a Quidditch Snitch, does not mean we are trust fund kids.

Because we love to rodeo, we work hard all year to make enough money just to keep going down the road. As a good friend recently said, “Just because we spend a lot of money, doesn’t mean we have a lot of money.” This is very true, more often than not, you’ll see college kids pulling into the rodeo with an old pickup running on fumes, and good old fashioned stock trailer that’s banging and clanging, on occasion you’ll catch a glimpse of a frazzled guardian angel following the rig. Now, there are some who are lucky enough to travel down the road in luxury trailers and new pickups, but that is not the norm.

4. We have become really good at functioning with very little sleep.

When you have class until four that you really can’t afford to miss, an eight-hour drive, and you are up for the next morning’s 9 a.m., slack you learn how to adapt. You also become very appreciative of all those years when your parents drove you and you were free to do as you wished, like sleep whenever.

5. We know how to have a good time.

Sometimes, there is some downtime between performances and we have a little time to kill so we gather some friends, crank some tunes, and have a dummy roping jackpot.

6. We are one big, mostly, happy family.

Like I said, it takes a lot to get down the road and sometimes we can’t do it all by ourselves and when that happens, there are dozens of friends right behind us ready to step in to lend a hand. Just like any family, we have our squabbles, but we work through whatever it may be.

7. We are experts at packing.

We know exactly how to fit ten bales of hay, seven buckets, five bags of feed, six saddles, three rope-cans, and enough clothes for five girls for a weekend into a pickup and trailer just by looking at it. It is a skill that has been perfected throughout the years.

8. We are amateur mechanics.

We may not know exactly how to fix that weird growling sound that only happens every other Tuesday when you make a left turn, but we can tinker with it for a while and probably figure it out. Fixing things well enough to at least get us by until we can get it to an actual mechanic is another thing we have learned along the way.

This was another small taste of what it means to be a college rodeo athlete. We love what we do, and we’d love to keep doing it for as long as we can. We are a little crazy, but the great ones always are, so take a chance and see where the rodeo road may take you.

“Don’t be afraid to go after what you want to do, and what you want to be. But don’t be afraid to be willing to pay the price.” – Lane Frost