CARSTAIRS – Cowpolk competing in a first-ever qualifier held on Friday in Carstairs have earned a spot in the upcoming Vegas Tuffest Junior World Championship.
The one-day event was organized and hosted by the Crooked Horn Junior Rodeo – a development association for those between the ages of three to 18 that was established in 2019 – which also had to cancel its own events on Saturday and Sunday alongside Carstairs Beef and Barley Days due to weather.
The direct qualifier was for timed events only in tie-down, breakaway and team roping as well as barrel racing and goat tying with contestants coming from all over Canada including B.C., Saskatchewan and Alberta, said Catherine Semark, secretary.
The number of qualifiers who earned a chance to compete in Las Vegas during the junior world championship event, which takes place Dec. 3-9, was determined by the overall number of entries, she said.
“So the more entries you have, technically, the more spots you get,” she said, adding during an interview on July 16 that they were still taking entries until the day of the event but anticipated approximately 12 to 14 would end up going.
Crooked Horn had never before tried hosting such an event, she said.
“More and more we have a lot of timed-event kids that want to enter these international competitions,” she told the Albertan.
“A lot of the U.S. associations don’t want to let us have spots,” she explained.
And when their association reached out to the organizers behind Tuffest a couple of years ago, there wasn’t immediately an availability to host the qualifier, she said.
So when representatives from the Las Vegas event followed up this year to ask if the association was still interested in putting on the qualifier, Semark said they jumped right in.
“It’s a pretty cool opportunity just to be able to one, host an event such as this to get kids to go there, and two, to be able to send them,” she said.
“Our association has brought home two bareback world champions, two saddlebronc world champions and a bull riding world champion since we started,” she said, adding that being able to offer a similar opportunity for those who compete in timed events is “pretty awesome.”
The rest of the weekend was supposed to be for the Crooked Horn Junior Rodeo’s regular season events.
“They’re two of our eight events of the series,” she said.
Organizers pulled the plug on the two events Saturday morning after rain deluged the rodeo grounds.
There were 109 contestants registered on both Saturday and Sunday, with each day counting as a separate rodeo featuring approximately 200 runs and outs, she said, referring to timed and chute-based events including bareback, saddle bronc, bull riding, pole bending, team roping and goat tying.
Some competitors had planned to be there for just one day, but she said there was also a sizeable overlapping contingent that planned to be there both days, she said.
“Our saddle bronc, bareback and bull riders, they compete throughout the season, and then we take the top two contestants in each age category in each event to the junior world finals,” she said.
Asked if the Crooked Horn Junior Rodeo is sanctioned by an organization such as the Alberta High School Rodeo Association, she said, “These are 100 per cent done independently.
“We’re just another junior rodeo association that is getting bigger and bigger every day.”
Offering some historical context, she said they started off just with roughstock.
“As we started to grow in the roughstock end, we had families that wanted to do more with us,” she said.
“So we decided to start adding a couple things.”
Before long, the rodeo had added barrels and poles, and from there turned into steer wrestling, tie-down roping and team roping as well as break-away.
“Then last year we added goat tying, and this year we added girls’ bull riding,” she said.
The association has grown substantially since an otherwise humble launch some six years ago.
“We were a tiny association … we had about 15 to 20 members, and as of yesterday we’re at 135,” she said.
“Things have gotten so busy so fast with us, it’s hard to keep up some days.”
And while this was the first time Crooked Horn hosted the qualifier for Vegas Tuffest in particular, the association is certainly no stranger to playing a role in fostering the future generation of top rodeo contenders.
“Up to now, we have just qualified roughstock for international competition,” she said.
“But we’ve qualified kids for the junior world finals in saddle bronc, bareback and bulls since 2019.”
