Category: Uncategorized

article by C.J. Aragon,
Odessa College Rodeo Coach

College Rodeo Coaches are a small fraternity that I am proud to be a part of. There are not very many college rodeo coaches around the country and they do not get the recognition or pay that their counterparts in sports like basketball and football do. However just because we aren’t paid on the same level as many other college coaches it is by no means an indicator of our passion for the sport of rodeo.
I know many great college rodeo coaches across the country, these coaches run programs from small community colleges to major universities. Although the students may only be influenced by their coach for one to four years the impact can last much longer than that. All of the coaches I respect want to see their students be successful in the arena and in life.
There are a few things I think many of our students need to realize about college rodeo coaches and coaches in general.
If you are in our program, we want you to do well. When we recruited you to our program we saw potential based on your past performances. You obviously saw value in the program as well or you wouldn’t have made the choice to join the program. There will be ups and downs along the way but your coach will always be in your corner and looks forward to seeing you do well.
What many students need to realize about coaches is that we have watched many students be successful and some fail. We can help with from our past experiences. We have in a sense been there, done that.
Just because you had success at the high school level does not guarantee that you will be successful on the college or professional level. In my experience I have watched former High School National Champions have limited success on the college and professional level, I have also witnessed students who never qualified for the High School National Finals Rodeo have tremendous success at the college and professional level. Their achievements had to do with their coachability and their ability to communicate with their coach.
Which brings us right back around to college rodeo coaches. Your rodeo coach can offer you suggestions on what skills you need to improve on. Your coach can give you feedback on what they see you do in competition and in the practice pen. They offer tips and training exercises for you to work on. Coaches can give you structure to your practices and workouts. You will not always like what your coach has to say. You may not always like what your coach has you do, but rest assured that your coach is working help you achieve your goals.
Coaches can do a lot for you, they can be a great resource if you choose to use them.
The most successful and most improved students in any sports programs are the ones who take the small bits coaches offer and apply them daily. Be Coachable!
C.J. Aragon is the Rodeo Coach at Odessa College and has a Master’s Degree in Coaching Education. He has been an invited speaker to the Global Coaches Seminar at Ohio University working with coaches in all sports from around the country.

“The people we surround ourselves with either raise or lower our standards. They either help us become the best version of ourselves or encourage us to become lesser versions of ourselves. We become like our friends. No man becomes great on his own. No woman becomes great on her own. The people around them help to make them great.
We all need people in our lives who raise our standards, remind us of our essential purpose, and challenge us to become the best version of ourselves.”
I saw this quote the other day and it truly fits with most athletes. It is defiantly true in for college rodeo students, I have watched it firsthand. I have watched how contagious students with great positive attitude and a tremendous work ethic can elevate those around them. Great attitudes and work can be contagious, it can lead everyone involved to become part of something greater than themselves.
It is a team thing.
Who is on your team? Who have you surrounded yourself with? Are your friends and teammates making you better? Are you making them better?
Are the people around you successful? If you want to improve quickly look for successful people in your chosen area and then join them. Watch them and learn from them. How do they practice? How do they handle business at the rodeos?  By surrounding yourself with successful people you will find out the small things they do differently than others and how the small details can lead to bigger and better results for you in the future. Find successful people and learn from them.
Are you surrounded by people with a positive attitude? A positive attitude is truly one of the most contagious things around. Some of the best student athletes I have ever coached had marginal talent and a phenomenal positive attitudes. It affects everyone around them teammates, competitors and even coaches. These people are easy to spot, and every successful team has a few around. If you can’t find someone with a great positive attitude, be that person with the positive attitude.
Every successful team also has the hard workers. The hard workers, the ones who show up early, stay late and do more than is asked of them. I think it is funny how many people who arrive late, leave early and get by, refer to the hard workers as “Lucky” when they get beat by them. Don’t let someone beat you because they simply outworked you. Find the hardest working teammates and join them.
For your team to truly be effective you need the realist. The coach or mentor. It is critical that you have this person in your group, someone who will tell you what you need to hear when you don’t want to hear it. Someone who will support you on your efforts to accomplish your goals.  This is the person who challenges you, who forces you to be better, and will hold you to a higher standard.
Being successful is a team thing. Choose a good team and be a good teammate you will be impressed with the results.

I am a big fan of the motivational speaker Eric Thomas.  If you don’t know who he is you need to look him up and watch some of his videos.
There are a few of his videos I show every team.  The first is his video on “How bad do you want it”  If you haven’t seen it I will strongly recommend that you do before you read any further.
Since you are still reading I hope that you have watched his video.  The message is great, when you want to succeed as bad as you want to breath you will be successful.  It is a great motivational video.
When we watch the video in the group the majority of the students are pumped up and excited to practice, for at least a day or two.  It is easy to see the students that understood the message in the video. After the excitement and the message has worn off the practice energy level and intensity levels begin to fall off for most students.  It is easy to be motivated or excited for a practice or two, anyone can do that.  Those college contestants who are still competing in June have found a way to motivate themselves every day regardless of their daily distractions.
From experience I would say that there is a big majority of the contestants that are motivated easily for a day or two.  Usually they somehow find that motivation the day’s right before the rodeo.  These are the guys that entered and think that they can be competitive with just a day or two of practice.  This is the group doing CPR on their goals. There is not really any other way to describe it.  It may work to save you to fight another day, but then again it might not.   A chance a lot are willing to take.
The message of the video was “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe you will be successful.”  Breathing is simple, a little thing you do every day.  Working towards your goals can be just as easy, just a little effort every day.  It will keep you alive, a little effort can keep your goals alive as well.
Being successful in the arena, in the classroom and in life is just like breathing.  Whatever you want to be successful at you will find a way to do every day. You breathe every minute of every day, it keeps you alive. You can’t breathe part time and have it work out well, unless you know people good at CPR.
Truly having goals doesn’t allow for taking a week off then working for two days before you compete or studying for two hours before a test.  This may work in the short term, but your long term success will be very limited.
The successful athletes, students, and people of this world are not motivated on a part time basis, they are motivated daily.  The top rodeo contestants don’t have their parents, coaches or friends asking them to go to practice, get an extra work out in, and exercise their horses.  Their effort to be successful has become just as routine as breathing.
Success is much like breathing.  If you keep breathing, you stay alive.  If you want to keep your goals alive and growing you find a way to work towards them on a daily basis.  It’s that simple.

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C.J. Aragon was named the 2008-2011 Grand Canyon Region Coach-of-the-Year. 2014-2015 WJCAC Coach-of-the-Year, 2016 Southwest Region Coach-of-the-Year, and 2010 National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association Coach-of-the-Year.

This is one of my favorite times of the year. The College National Finals Rodeo and State High School Finals Rodeos going on across the country. What more can a college rodeo coach as for?
It is always interesting to me to watch the growth and maturity of rodeo students in the years that we get to watch them. I, like many coaches, have watched some student’s progress from high school rodeo, through college rodeo and on to win World Championships.
Some of the most talented students in high school that were highly recruited never make the jump to be competitive at the collegiate level. Others who were overlooked in high school go on to be outstanding college competitors. It is very interesting to watch and learn from. I know that in the past I have missed and recruited the very successful high school student and later had them underachieve in college. I have also regretted not recruiting many high school students.
Over the course of the past ten years I have had the chance to visit with any current and future champions of our sport. At an early age you could tell that they were destined for great things by what they did in the arena.
I think back to getting to visit with some current champions, many of them while they were still in high school. Most all of them were exciting to talk to because of the passion they had for competition. Winning titles didn’t motivate them every day, the love of competition motivated them.
I think this is very important because many physically talented students are motivated by winning and at an early age winning is easy because of their physical skills. In many cases in rodeo these students do not learn or work on the fundamentals of their chosen event, they simply rely on their god given skills. For the physically gifted they don’t learn to compete, many simply just learned to win without much effort, and I don’t believe this is a good thing.
The students who learn to love competition learn to work their way to a higher level. The drive that it takes to be successful, will then help elevate them as a competitor. These are the late bloomers. Their passion for competition will help them continue to improve. They may not have been that competitive when we watched them coming through high school, but they were always improving. In college they may have gone unnoticed for a while, but the late bloomers always have a way of eventually finding their way to the top.
Those who love to compete will work to be better. They will find ways to improve and develop their skills on a daily basis. They will be willing to grind every day to be ready for their next opportunity to compete. They are not afraid of competition.
Passion for competition is a great indicator for future success.

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C.J. Aragon was named the 2008-2011 Grand Canyon Region Coach-of-the-Year. 2014-2015 WJCAC Coach-of-the-Year, 2016 Southwest Region Coach-of-the-Year, and 2010 National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association Coach-of-the-Year.

Hello ropers!  Great to be back writing the second article! I hope everyone had a chance to read and try what was talked about in first tutorial. I am going to follow up where I left off.
Again, fundamentals are where you keep your focus. I always have students calling or sending messages/videos with a problem and every time the problem can be traced back to a fundamental oversight. This is where we dissect the steps I mentioned.
Step one for headers is scoring. This means learning to score yourself so your horse becomes consistent in your commands. If you anticipate the gates opening and your body moves, your horse is going to move as well. Keep your balance equal in your saddle and stirrups and nod with your head, not your back or body. Make sure your left hand is staying consistent with the pressure you have holding your horse. I prefer to use my stomach/abdominal area or saddle horn as a guide so I’m not lifting or moving. This is the start of your run.
Leaving the corner of the box sets the tone for the run. More often than not, headers will leave the corner of the box leaning forward to leave with their horse. Granted this keeps you from going off the back of your horse but it is not correct. This causes you to start your swing later and be out of balance in your swing. The first swing usually goes forward and up and now you have to take extra swings to get your tip down to rope once in position. If we leave the corner of the box balanced with our left hand moving forward, then our weight will remain equally balanced in the stirrups allowing us to square our shoulders and hips to our target. Now our horses are leaving flat, smooth and faster, which means they are out of our way to get the swing started with less effort and match the tip of our loop and swing to the head or horns of the steer.
Watch videos of the open ropers in slow motion and you will see how everyone of them leave the box rotating arms, shoulders and hips to get square to the target. If you don’t do this it definitely does not mean you can not catch, just means you are working harder to achieve the same result as someone who is doing it and you are being less efficient. Work smarter, not harder. Remember it is a timed event!
As we continue from month to month I will break down the “How and Why” of the steps which creates the solid practices. The catch is what makes us feel good but what makes us feel better is to understand how to get better and catch every time as we work in the practice pen.
Until next month, thank you for your time and work on what works and not recreating the same habit that doesn’t work.
Thank you and God Bless!
Krece Harris

story by Terry Rhodes
“Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.” That quote has a lot of meaning to Lori Tierney and she strives to live by it every day. “I believe in this 100% and the preparation that I do in my roping and working my horses is part of that. It is a true passion for me. I believe that the amount of effort you put into something is what you will get out. I do that kind of preparation so when I get to the rodeo no matter how the cards fall I am satisfied with the results”
Lori has been in the Mid-States association 12 years and has served as event director for the breakaway roping for the last few years. You’ll find her in just about any event that includes throwing a rope, and sometimes barrel racing. “I’m kind of a closet barrel racer.”, she admits with a laugh. She likes the association because of the great people that are in it. “In the summer we travel all over the state each week. I feel like everyone is family; everyone supports one another. We have rodeos in a lot of little towns and the committees that put them on are great.” She is also in the KPRA, NSRA, and WPRA.
The Tierney name is well known in rodeo so it came quite naturally for Lori to get an early start in the arena. “My dad calf roped and team roped so it’s always been part of our family. Growing up on a ranch, I have always been around horses and roping. I did some junior rodeo and 4-H. I had a rodeo scholarship and went to Garden City Community College for two years and transferred to Southwestern Oklahoma State University and got my degree in social work.”
In roping, horse power is everything and Lori has a couple of great horses; Bueno and Charger. “Bueno was raised by my cousins, “Tierney Quarter horses.” Which is neat since they live right down the road and I travel with my cousin, Ginalee to many of the rodeos and ropings. My ‘B’ string horse, Charger was a raffle horse that I won in college and he’s turned out to be a really neat horse.”
Her home is in Broken Bow, Neb. with her family. Her parents are Larry and Kathy Tierney and she has an older brother, Cole. Lori says that she’s had several people helped in her rodeo career but none more than her father. “He’s turned out thousands of calves for me and he’s given me every opportunity to succeed in the arena. Jan Brown has always been a big influence and supporter. She took me under her wing when I was just starting out and has been big a supporter. I have a good friend, Lacey Baehler that is one of the most positive people I know. I think we push each other to bring out the best in each other. Those friendships are irreplaceable. There are so many people that have helped me.”
Lori’s work week is a mix of jobs and duties that keep her on the run. She’s a secretary for Power Solutions part of the day, runs cattle with her dad, does day work, rides horses, and teaches a Zumba class. “I love to dance, so Zumba is an opportunity to share my passion and hopefully inspire people. I’m lucky I have a really awesome balance in my life with all different avenues. I get to live my dream everyday!  I’m pretty simple really. I love to rope, dance, am a huge Husker football fan and love to enjoy life!”