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contributed photo by JESSICA TROTTIER
Valerie James,
one of only two Sandy High students who
participate in high school rodeo, competes in an
event.
By Jonathan Frochtzwajg /
The Sandy Post
Wed, Nov 17, 2010
Valerie James, a Sandy
High School first-year student, rides her horse,
Twilight, in two small laps at no more than a
canter. It’s a recent, bracing evening at Boring’s
Mt. Hood Equestrian & Event Center, and under the
arena’s overhead fluorescent lights, the horse’s
quickening breath is just visible.
Then they’re off.
Valerie puts Twilight into a
gallop and speeds to the center of the arena, where
three barrels are arranged in a triangle. She
careens around the barrel to the right, her horse
leaning precariously into the turn.
Then, righting herself and
crossing the arena, she loops tightly around the
barrel to the left. After rounding the last barrel,
Valerie comes riding straight back to the starting
point, Twilight’s hooves beating thunderously on the
ground.
It’s called barrel racing, and
Valerie, one of only two Sandy High students who
compete in high school rodeo — the other is
first-year student Austin Madsen — says it’s perhaps
her favorite rodeo event.
In a real barrel race, she
explains, “you start out in the alleyway, and that’s
the really intense part of it … Just to hear your
name called by the announcer, and just standing
there waiting. It’s dark, and then when you run in
the arena your eyes adjust, and there’s a ton of
people watching you.”
Even after having run it
countless times, Valerie says, the barrel race is
still scary.
“You never know if the arena is
going to be muddy, or how your horse is going to
do,” she says.
And it’s still hard, too —
especially for a rider as petite as she is.
“You’re trying to muscle this
big old horse, and I’m really small, so it’s
difficult,” Valerie says.
But despite — or maybe because
of — all that, “flying around the course” is “just a
real adrenaline rush,” she says. “It’s just beating
the clock, that’s the best part about it.”
She has been doing rodeo and
gaming — rodeo-like horse-riding events — since she
was about 7 years old, says Norma Jean James, her
mother.
But until she was 4, Norma Jean
says, horses weren’t really a part of her daughter’s
life.
“She was 4 years old, and we
asked her what she wanted for her birthday, and she
said, ‘I want to ride a horse,’” she says. “And we
were like, ‘Where did this come from?’”
Today, Norma Jean says, “all we
do is horses.” The family has “up to 14” horses at
their property outside Sandy, as well as cattle and
both an outdoor and an indoor practice arena. She
tends the horses; her husband acts as a coach. Both
parents accompany their daughter as she competes in
high school rodeos across Oregon, helping her pursue
her ultimate goal: to become a professional rodeo
rider.
“She has always told me that
junior high rodeo and high school rodeo is like a
pro rodeo, but for kids,” Norma Jean says. “You
dress up, you clean your horse up, you go out and
compete against some of the best people that are in
the state. She really likes to push her horse to see
how far she can go … Someday she wants to go to be a
pro and go to (National Finals Rodeo) in Vegas. And
this is kind of getting her there; this is what its
going to be like.”
For now, though, Valerie is
just trying to acclimate to high school rodeo, where
she is among the youngest competitors.
“A lot of these girls at my
level, they’ve been doing it since they were really
tiny,” she says. “Seeing and hearing about how well
they did last year, it’s really intimidating.”
At the same time, she’s
learning to balance rodeo with her new, high school
workload.
“It’s really hard, because of
me being a freshman,” she says. “It’s a new
experience at school, plus more traveling; it’s hard
to deal with all the homework on the road.”
“She lives for her horses,”
Norma Jean says. “She comes home, grabs a snack,
she’s out in the barn. We drag her in, 9 o’ clock at
night, she does her homework, we eat dinner. She’ll
be up ’til 11, gets up at 5 sometimes to get her
homework done.”
“She just works very hard,” she
continues. “She pushes herself a lot, where we have
to tell her, ‘OK, your grades are important, A’s and
B’s are great, but you don’t need to be perfect.”
After Valerie graduates, she
plans to try professional rodeo for a year. If it
doesn’t work out, Norma Jean says, she’ll go to
college and study to become a veterinarian.
“It’s just really exciting for
us to finally see her from being 4 years old and not
knowing what she was going to do, to seeing now
that, we’re preparing her — she’s preparing herself
— to go pro,” she says.
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