Announcers' Stand

The announcers' stand is, in many ways, the heart of a rodeo. Not only is the action described here and the (unofficial) scores announced, but the timers and arena secretaries sit here. Timers use stopwatches and electronic timers (often at the same time, so that there's a backup) to determine how long the barrel racer took to finish her run or whether the cowboy stayed on the bronc for eight seconds or not. Arena secretaries keep up with who is up next in the event (which can be quite a task in rough stock; timed event competitors run in a given order, but rough stock riders go in the order in which their horses or bulls get loaded into the chutes) and with any judges' rulings on penalties or re-rides. They also check over the judges' score sheets and then fill out and sign the official score sheet. This is why what the announcers say is unofficial; until the secretary has seen and signed off on the judges' sheets, nothing in the event is official.

Penalties can include such arcane things as a hat penalty, which happens when a pole bender or barrel racer's hat blows off her head before she enters the arena, and which adds five seconds to her time, or failure to "mark out" the bucking horse, which results in a "no score" for a cowboy. (To mark out a horse, the cowboy must be leaning back in the saddle when the chute gate opens, both spurs touching the horse's shoulders. He must remain in this position until the horse finishes his first jump.)

At the NHSRA finals, we spend a fair amount of time in the announcers' stand, because that is where we can get the score sheets and scan them. (We enter all data off scanned copies, so that the originals can stay with the secretary. There are a lot of other people up there as well; two announcers, two announcers' secretaries, who keep track of the bio sheets and run the Excel sheet we built that allows them to quickly show where a given score fits into the standings, two arena secretaries (rough stock and timed events) and four (at least) timers. The announcers' stand in the photo is quite large and easy to move around in, even with all those people; other arenas we've been to have been much smaller. At Gallup the first year, it was impossible to get in and out of the announcers' stand because the backup timers had to actually sit in front of the door. (Gallup expanded the stand by the next year; it's much better now.)

The last night of this years' finals, the announcers announced that they would be collecting money that evening for the bull rider who had been injured earlier in the week; Oklahoma and Alberta had started off by making donations and challenging other states and provinces to do the same. The snowball started going, and soon people were coming to the announcers' stand and dropping off money with one of the announcers' secretaries. At first it was national directors from various states and provinces; soon it became arena staff, like the doctors from the Kansas Orthopedic Center, the bullfighters and the EMTs. Then it went to individuals, many of them other competitiors, like the team roping team from Florida that put in $350. Soon, more than $12,000 had been collected to help meet expenses, along with a number of other things.

It was an amazing thing to see, as people came together to help someone they didn't even know. It was something that makes me truly like rodeo.