Tiah DeGrofft is a 38-year volunteer and the 47th President of the Pendleton Round-Up. She is the first female president in the Round-Up’s history. DeGrofft combines her passion for Pendleton and the Round-Up with a career background in professional Sports Marketing and Event Management. She joined the board to give back to her community and continue to pursue her passion in sports marketing. DeGrofft served as a director before becoming president. She received a nomination from her peers, and the Board voted that she was the best person for the job, and the stockholders agreed!
I had the opportunity to interview Tiah DeGrofft, Pendleton Round-Up’s first female president, and hear firsthand about her path to presidency and why the Pendleton Round-Up is a one-of-a-kind event each year.
RL: You’ve been involved with Pendleton Round-Up since you were about six years old. Will you tell me a little bit about your experience with the Round-Up and how you became involved in Rodeo?
TD: My parents didn’t grow up in Pendleton. They moved here right after they got married. In order to meet people, they kept hearing that the Pendleton Round-Up was kind of the epicenter of town—so both of them started volunteering for the Round-Up. Fast forward to my childhood. My dad was a volunteer at the Round-Up, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. I think to get us out of the house, she would send my brother and me to work parties with my dad. My dad would give us a nickel or a quarter to walk around the massive track with a five-gallon bucket and pick up rocks. That was how he would keep us busy so he could go do other things with the Round-Up. That was probably my first official volunteer job. We “guesstimated” I was six, maybe five years old, and when I was eight years old, my dad was on the Happy Canyon board, which is our night show. I started volunteering over there as well. My dad said, “You’re down there all the time and doing all the things, may as well be a volunteer there.”
My dad was the Livestock Director at Happy Canyon. We were rebuilding stagecoaches, so my brother and I started repainting stagecoaches. We have what we call pennant bearers who carry the flags in the parade in front of our cleaning fort, so we were going to the parades anyway. We started hauling a horse so that I could pennant bear. I then started working in the hospitality room, doing dishes, and clearing the dishes off tables. Then eventually, in 1999, I was named a Princess to our fort. You have to be a princess before you can be a Queen. In 2001 I was selected as Queen for that year.
Once I graduated from college, I moved to Portland and worked for the PGA Tour. I would make it home only for Christmas and Round-Up. I ended up moving to the greater Boston area, Rhode Island, where I owned a sports marketing company. I continued to just get back around Round-Up. Unfortunately, my dad got sick with cancer, and then my brother’s wife started having babies and I thought I’m just too far from home, so I ended up moving back to Pendleton. Once I got back, I started getting more involved in the Round-Up, and eventually, I was nominated for our Hall of Fame Board of Directors. I went on the Hall of Fame board as a Round-Up delegate and eventually became their president. And then one year after being their president, I was asked to apply for the panel’s Round-Up board. So I came over and spent eight years as Sponsor Director for the Round-Up, which was right in my wheelhouse given my sports marketing background. After eight years as Sponsor Director, last November, I was elected president. It’s been a really fun ride.
We were the first major rodeo to have a female president, and then Reno named Carrie Ann Sattler president, which was awesome. We met in Vegas, and it’s just really cool for the sport to have such a big year. Vogue Magazine also named 2024 the Year of the Cowgirl, and it seems like we’re just kind of steamrolling into that.
You just live your life, and every day goes by, and you don’t think anything crazy happens that day, but then look back on the year, and all of a sudden, you’re like, holy smokes! It has really been that way this year, you know, and signing on to be president is a huge deal. It never seemed like I was doing anything outside of my wheelhouse, and now looking back on it and having some of these conversations with the media, it’s pretty cool to be able to fly that flag for women across the sport of rodeo.
RL: Will you explain your role, your daily tasks, and what you’re up to right now?
TD: Our entire board is made up of volunteers, including the president. My job as president is to oversee the board; keep the board on track; oversee; and make sure that we’re following our mission, getting our critical tasks completed and staying on course with the long-term planning. Round-Up is so ingrained with the city we have an ex officio position on our Chamber of Commerce board of directors so I end up at a lot of meetings about a lot of different things—kind of the jack-of-all-trades. I was really busy throughout the winter checking in with the board helping them with things that they need and making sure that they’re on the right track. We have 16 incredible people on our board, and they don’t require a lot of babysitting, which is fantastic! They’re each specialized: for example, we have a Livestock Director, a Medical Director, and an Arena Director. They each know their area of focus very well. I get involved in those areas on a broader level, such as the changes this year as we bring in a new charity. Our Saturday used to be National Patriot Day. This year, we’re moving that to Friday and bringing in the Golden Circle of Champions, which raises funds for pediatric cancer patients in our area. We’re very excited to welcome them on board, and because I had a couple of ties into that, I’ve spearheaded bringing them in, so that’s been a big focus for me recently.
RL: What are some of the other charities that you work with, and what are the other theme days going to be this year?
TD: Wednesday, we have the Farmers Ending Hunger charity. Round-Up started as a celebration of the end of harvest here in eastern Oregon so that ties in well with us. Farmers Ending Hunger was started here in Umatilla County, and their mission is to raise extra acres of crops that they give to the Oregon Food Bank to help feed the hungry. Thursday is Tough Enough to Wear Pink; this will be our 18th anniversary with Tough Enough to Wear Pink. Friday, as we discussed, we will have National Patriot and Military Appreciation Day, and then Saturday, the Golden Circle of Champions.
Because Pendleton is such a small town, we rely heavily on tourism. All of our parking lots are run by charities, as well as the majority of our concession stands, our beer booths, and our camping areas, so nearly every charity in town or service organization like the Rotary or the Kiwanis Club are involved in one way or another to use Round-Up as one of their biggest fundraisers of the year. We also have a lot of the local sports teams—one of my favorite booths at Round-Up is the swim team’s with really great hamburgers. Sports teams from around town use Round-Up as fundraisers for their costs as well, so we have tons of charities that we support. In 2020 when we had to cancel the rodeo, we knew that all of these charities relied on us to keep going and even the downtown businesses, restaurants, and hotels, so we started a fund called Let ‘Er Buck Cares and asked our sponsors if they wanted to donate to it. For our ticket holders, we offered to either roll your ticket, refund your ticket, or you could donate the cost of your ticket to this fund. We were hoping to make two to three hundred thousand dollars, but we made almost a million dollars from the generosity of the Round-Up family, and we were able to then pay a lot of our contract help who obviously were not working when all the rodeos were canceled, and all of our charities—we made everyone whole. It was an incredible way to make something positive out of a terrible year.
RL: Talking about community and circling back to women in the Western industry in similar positions, we featured Carrie Ann Sattler as one of our cover stories earlier this year. Are there similarities between Reno Rodeo and Pendleton Round-Up?
TD: There are a lot of similarities in size and scale. And when you’re looking at the Large Outdoor Rodeo of the Year competition, both of us are always included in that. But we’re very different in that Reno is a metropolitan area. We’re three hours from any major city. We’re only about 16,000 people. Reno is more of a traditional rodeo where you have sponsors and banners in the arena. They’re much more commercialized than we are. That was my challenge as Sponsor Director; we don’t offer any advertising in our arena, even in our grand entry. It’s the American flag, the Oregon flag, things like that. So trying to find sponsors that understood our mission without needing those return-on-investment opportunities was really my challenge. Reno has a lot of incredible sponsors. Carrie did a fantastic job with it; I know she was a sponsor director as well. So while we are similar in the sport of rodeo, our business models are very different for that matter. Carrie and I personally, though, have a lot in common. We were both in the same sorority in college. The conversations we get to have, it’s more friends, really, than even business for similar people. It’s just wonderful.
RL: Talking about the sponsorships, what kind of unique opportunities did you incorporate? I know you have a sports marketing background, so I’m sure that was very helpful, but Pendleton is a unique location—there are not many hotels or lodging options. How did you overcome some of those challenges?
TD: A lot of times, my first introduction was just selling them on the tradition and the heritage of Round-Up. Many companies, when you call, would say, Pendleton Round-Up, and they’re like, where’s Pendleton? What is this rodeo? It’s not like saying Reno, where everybody knows where that is. So my first thing was always to say, “Come and see us, just be our guest, come out”, and once they set foot on our property and felt the energy, there’s something about it. We hear time and time again that people want to replicate one thing or another from Pendleton, and you can’t. It’s like this feeling when you pull into town and the whole town is just buzzing with Round-Up. I mean, the kids are out of school, so they can volunteer. All of the town is really; the townspeople and the businesses wrap their arms around it. So you get here, and you’re immersed in it. It’s not like you leave and go a few city blocks down, and you can go to a restaurant and not know that the Round-Up is happening, right? They get here, and they would just be like, “Oh, now we get it, and we want to be involved.”
Once we got potential sponsors here, we could show them hospitality opportunities and that’s really what a lot of companies use. They bring clients, executives, or vendors. They understood then that we could put their banners outside of the concourse and how visible that would make them. I think when they saw how special it was to not have advertising in their arena, it wasn’t ever a question. It wasn’t like, “Well, how can we?” They just were like, “Oh, we get it.” So yeah, it’s definitely an experience. It is stepping back in time and in a really great way.
We also created the 1910 room. We wanted more of a setting for a foodie experience or those coming from the city that weren’t necessarily there for the rodeo action. They were there more for the experience. The 1910 room is right on the arena floor. Guests have their own cocktails and their own restrooms. We have a chef come in and cook their meals for the day. Obviously, if they want to leave and come back and forth between the 1910 room and the general public, they can. That was a big help to get some businesses in, and they could sit in a quiet, smaller, more intimate setting together.
RL: Do you have any tips for first-time Round-Up attendees?
TD: Well, the hotel, first and foremost, nail down where you’re going to stay because that’s the hardest part. You have to decide what adventure you want to make of it. Choose your own adventure type of week. We start with a kickoff concert. We have two nights of bull riding. Then we have four days of rodeo action with the Happy Canyon at night. You can keep yourself busy all day. You’ll burn yourself out very quickly. So I always look at the schedule of events and pick. A lot of what happens Wednesday through Saturday includes the same options. Everything’s happening all four days. So don’t necessarily try to cram everything into one day. There are so many little nuances that aren’t happening at the rodeo grounds. We have a cowboy breakfast that takes place in a park downtown that has really great pancakes, and the radio station is there, it’s a fun atmosphere. Also, there are the underground tours; Pendleton has this great city underneath the city. The downtown has its own action and then you can come to the rodeo for a couple of days. You’ll want to make sure that you take in Happy Canyon. It’s a really cool pageant that tells the story of the Oregon Trail. There are the Native Americans, and then a gold boomtown comes about, and there’s some fighting between the Native Americans and the immigrants, and it tells their story. We also have a lot of our Native American tribe very active in our rodeo, so they put on a lot of Powwow dance competitions and beauty competitions, and if you’ve never gotten to see Native American regalia up close, it’s stunningly beautiful, many of the dresses being worn are great, great grandmother’s dresses that were handmade hundreds of years ago. It’s just a really cool piece of our rodeo, I think. Also, over in the Native American Village, there is incredible jewelry shopping, which is one of my personal favorites. They also make a fry bread taco. If you’ve never had fry bread with berries on it, that is to die for, or if you’re more of a salty person try fry bread tacos—can’t get enough of them. It’s one of my Round-Up favorites.
There’s definitely a lot going on. If you’re here with a bachelor or a bachelorette party, there is a card passport available. If you get a drink at each one of our watering holes around the grounds, you get prizes.
There’s something for everybody. There is a carnival downtown for kids. I mean, there really is something for everybody.
RL: Is there anything new for fans or contestants this year that they can look forward to? Is there anything that you’re excited about?
TD: I’m really excited about the Golden Circle of Champions. That’s going to be a great change. I know a lot of the Cowboys at the NFR are getting behind the cause, too, so that’s going to be a great opportunity to raise awareness of pediatric cancer. One of the things that I love about Pendleton is that we’re steeped in tradition; at 114 years, there aren’t usually big sweeping changes, we try to find those little nuggets where we can and polish them and get as close to perfection as we can for the year, but you know here we are 114 years later and we’re still finding those nuggets that we can polish. One of my favorite things is that there aren’t big sweeping changes but it’s also never the same. The cowboys are different, the livestock is different, and the crowd is different depending on what day you’re coming. Wednesday and Thursday have a little more of a family feel, and Friday and Saturday have a little more of a Mardi Gras-type feel. Every day brings its own vibes that way. We are bringing in the US Navy Leap Frog parachute team. We had them last year; they’re a military skydiving group that comes in and lands into the arena just prior to the rodeo with their big flags, and you always cross your fingers that we get the jet flyover on Friday and Saturday, that’s a last-minute military call, it always depends on pilots and what else is happening in the world if they’re able to do that but always the fan favorite so we’re looking forward to it.
RL: In closing, is there anything else you’d like to add about becoming the first Pendleton Round-Up president?
TD: I’m really grateful for the opportunity. My favorite part is the number of young women who come up and say, “I used to want to be queen. Now I want to be president.” Don’t limit yourself. Well, you know, you can be both. And then the people who have reached out for mentorship, that just really fills my heart. And again, I don’t know that I have the secret sauce, just day by day living to be myself. But, if I can help one other female know that she’s capable of anything, I am more than happy to fly that flag.
RL: Oh, that’s awesome. I love that, especially having a little girl; we have to raise her so she knows she can do anything. One last question. What’s your favorite rodeo other than Round-Up?
TD: I have a couple I last went to a few years ago. My mom is from Red Bluff, California. So, that is like a family reunion for me. My family on my mom’s side is very involved there, and then my dad is from a small town up here called Joseph and they have the Joseph days. If you’ve ever been there, it’s like little Switzerland. There are very high mountains. There’s a big lake. It’s a small resort town, and they have a really great rodeo that I look forward to every year. It’s another one that even the Cowboys come and camp out, and everybody goes to the lake and really enjoys it. We were just down in Sisters. That’s an incredible rodeo. I have yet to make it to many of the Texas rodeos. That’s on my list for next year!
Tiah DeGrofft Bio
Tiah is a second-generation director and a 37-year volunteer with the Pendleton Round-Up. She started volunteering at the age of 6, coming to Round-Up work parties with her father Duane. Her first job was picking rocks out of the arena. Since then, she has done everything from acting as a pennant bearer in parades to driving VIP Shuttle and saddling trophy horses for champions. In 1999, Tiah served as a Princess on the Pendleton Round-Up Court and, in 2001, was named Queen. Tiah is a past board member and President of the Pendleton Round-Up and Happy Canyon Hall of Fame. For 37 years, Tiah has also been a cast member in Happy Canyon. Her parts have varied from side saddler and emigrant to the madam at Goldie’s Place.
During her 8 years on the Board of Directors, Tiah has served as Sponsor Director, something that ties in nicely with her background in, and love for, Professional Sports Marketing. During her time as Sponsor Director, Tiah nearly tripled sponsorship contributions and oversaw many renovations to the Sponsor program. As part of her directorship, Tiah also oversaw the shuttle service and chaired the VIP Committee. One of the things she has enjoyed the most is being able to welcome guests near and far to Pendleton while offering them world-class hospitality.
As a member of the Board of Directors, Tiah served on numerous committees, including Xtreme Bulls, Concert, Trademark, and Public Relations. She has chaired the Farm II committee, Policy and Procedure Committee, and Events Committee and served as Secretary of the Board for six years. Tiah was instrumental in bringing the 1910 Room to the grounds and revamping the VIP program to what it is today. Tiah is also the first woman to complete two full terms on the Board of Directors.
Tiah would like to sincerely thank her friends and family for their unwavering support, especially her Mother, Patty Ann, who stepped in and stepped up at every whim over the last eight years. The board commitment is really a two-person job, and Tiah contributes much of her success to the support Patty Ann has given her. In addition, Tiah would like to thank her fellow board members, the incredible Round-Up Staff, and the amazing team of Sponsor and shuttle volunteers.
About Pendleton Round-Up
2024 will be the 114th Pendleton Round-Up, which is synonymous with “Tradition.” That feeling of stepping back in time and experiencing a true Wild West Exhibition is what makes the Pendleton Round-Up so special.
One thousand two hundred volunteers make the event happen each September.
Pendleton is known for its hospitality; it speaks not only to the rodeo but also to the city. Every restaurant, hotel, store owner, etc., impacts that feeling of Welcome you get when you come to Pendleton.
The entire city is involved in some way. Schools close so kids can volunteer, and playgrounds become campgrounds. Local service organizations and nonprofits use Round-Up as a fundraiser.
