This past weekend Garden City hosted the 59th annual Garden City Community College Rodeo. I got the opportunity to work as a student athletic trainer on the first day.
Being a student athletic trainer for any other sport is pretty simple; not too many injuries occur. If an injury occurs most of the time, it is something small and nothing to major. Working the rodeo event as a student athletic trainer was a different type of feeling.
When I first got there, I was really nervous, because rodeo is different than every other sport. Riders are constantly putting their lives at risk, because anything could happen at any time; granted that’s the same for other sports.
Being on the side watching everything go down, my heart was racing because it is something I never worked before and a whole new environment around people, I’ve never met before.
Every time there was a bull rider, bareback bronc riding and saddle bronc riding I would catch myself holding my breath till the rider was up and walking out of the arena. With those events it was like anything could happen at any given moment and I’d have to stay on my toes at all times.
During the breaks, or the other events were like a time we were all able to breathe and relax. Even though injuries could occur at any given time, it didn’t have such an intense feeling.
The night I worked the worst thing that I saw was one of the bareback bronc riders got thrown into the fence and hit his face. Luckily, the guy was able to get up and walk on his own. The guy never came up to us for help or anything but we knew to watch over him because he hit his head.
After watching that incident and seeing that he didn’t come up to us, showed me that these riders are fearless because no one really came up to us asking for help or needed anything looked at. It seemed as if the riders were all able to take care of themselves.
When the rodeo was over, we all had a sigh of relief that there was nothing major that we had to step in for. Granted we didn’t have to do much that day I still feel like we all learned how to deal with the little bit of anxiety that comes with rodeo. It was definitely an experience that I enjoyed and would work again if I had the opportunity to do.
